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MR 


. GARDINER'S 
ADDRESS 

TO THE 


PHI 


BETA KAPPA SOCIETY, 






ON 


AMERICANEDUCATION 






IN 


CLASI 


31CAL 


LEARNING AND ELOaUENCE. 







2i9» 



AN 



ADDRESS 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



PHI BETA KAPPA SOCIETY 



OP 



HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
28 AUGUST, 1834, 



ON 



CLASSICAL LEARNING AND ELOaUENCE. 



By WILLIAM HOWARD GARDINER, 

COUNSELLOR AT LAW. 



Quid voveat dulci nutricula majus alumno, 
Qu^m sapere, ct fari ut posait quas sentiat? 

HoR. Ep. I. iv. 



CAMBRIDGE: 
JAMES MUNROE AND COMPANY, 

1834. 



LC/ 



ooz 



CAMBRIDGE: 
CHARLES FOLSOM, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY. 



ADDRESS. 



MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN : 

Every speaker, who addresses any assembly for 
whatever purpose in the present crisis of affairs, 
is strongly tempted to find his theme in that all- 
absorbing subject, national politics. But the occasion 
of a literary festival (may I not say the chief hterary 
festival of New England 1) held in this seat of learn- 
ing, by an association of lettered men, demands that 
something should be done or attempted for the cause 
of letters. 

Conscious of my poor ability to do justice to this 
cause in any of its wide-spread relations, I approach 
the subject with great diffidence ; and should gladly 
have avoided altogether this honorable responsibility, 
had I any more acceptable excuse than that pressure 
of other affairs, which, being common to all of us, 
should be lightly pleaded by none. Strange as it may 
seem to many, it is a fact which some at least who 
hear me will feel to be true, that a profession justly 
ranked among the learned and the liberal, and which 
involves the exercise of public speaking of a certain 
kind, almost disqualifies those who are actively en- 
gaged in its practice from speaking before critics and 
1 



men of letters on the great questions of literature and 
philosophy. In the more elevated walks of the legal 
profession, how engrossing and exclusive are its pur- 
suits ! And as it is actually practised among us, with 
no division of its manifold labors, it were difficult for 
any but a lawyer to conceive how much of this Hberal 
and glorious art is merely mechanical ; — how much of 
life is wasted in the drudgery of forms, and how much 
in the hard study of trivial facts, a species of learning 
not deserving the name of knowledge, and which, 
when once used, we are studious only to forget. Years 
so spent may sharpen the faculties ; but they neither 
fill nor elevate the mind. Men thus occupied can- 
not, or at least ordinarily do not, keep pace with 
the literary progress of the world. They turn their 
thoughts habitually into no such channels. Nor is this 
the worst. The more elegant acquisitions of youth 
are, alas ! too often neglected and too soon forgot- 
ten. All the bright trains of ideas, rich as a Roman 
triumph, which were wont to rise spontaneously in 
the mind freshly filled with classical associations, 
exhilarated by the noble sentiments, warmed by the 
poetic imagery, and inspired by the godlike eloquence 
of antiquity, will be found to have fled, like a dream, 
with the habits which produced them, and the very 
memory of the materials out of which they were 
formed. Whenever, therefore, a practical lawyer shall 
have been induced by your call to quit the forum 
for this place, more appropriate to scholars and men 
of Uterary renown, it would be wise in him, not to 
depart more widely from the usual forensic track than 
the occasion may absolutely require. 

Impressed with such sentiments, I propose to sub- 
mit for your indulgent consideration a plain argu- 
ment upon a practical subject, which I have much 



at heart, and which seems to me of great common 
concern. 

I complain ; — I complain, that the spirit of the age, 
and, I fear, the spirit of our government, and, I am sure, 
the present habits and impulses of society among us, 
notwithstanding the fine things which have been said 
of it (partly by ourselves), are adverse to the growth 
and cultivation of the more delicate and finer species 
of hterature. I complain especially, that classical htera- 
ture is htde cultivated ; less cultivated than it was ; 
not absolutely, perhaps, but compared with the ad- 
vancement of other things ; — it is not loved, it is not 
followed, as it used to be ; — nay, I fear that at this 
moment it is barely in repute among us. I complain 
that education is not what it should be in this respect, 
even here in the midst of the flourishing schools of 
New England (in general our just boast), and in this 
enhghtened age, which so vaunteth itself beyond its 
predecessors. And I charge you who have any lin- 
gering love of classical literature, all who regard the 
great common cause of letters, all who have at heart 
the real welfare and substantial reputation of our coun- 
try, I charge you all, as you love that country and her 
institutions and those children whom you hope shall 
inherit them, that you look carefully and candidly at 
the actual condition and prospects of our literary 
affairs. Grave questions are involved. Let them be 
well weighed. 

We live in an age of great mental activity and 
excitement. Long intermission of general wars has 
turned the industry of the whole human family to the 
cultivation of the arts of peace in a degree never be- 
fore known. The waste places of the earth are made 
productive, — her farthest regions explored. The most 
valueless substances of nature are turned, as by the 



wand of a magician, into the finest fabrics and the 
most glorious structures. The products of every soil, 
the manufactures of every nation, are on the wings of 
all the winds, traversing the remotest seas to adminis- 
ter to the luxuries of civilized Hfe. New wants grow 
out of abundance ; and these are daily developing 
new resources for inexhaustible supphes. New means 
of motion and transportation are rapidly changing the 
relations of things. Space is contracted, time is mul- 
tiplied, by the astonishing results of mechanical con- 
trivance ; and invention is still on the rack to facilitate 
yet farther, and accelerate yet faster, the intercourse of 
man and man. The press, too, is at work with a celer- 
ity and productiveness hitherto unparalleled. By this 
freedom of intercourse and communion among men, 
wealth and knowledge are everywhere accumulated 
and rapidly diffused. These are power ; — and they 
are now everywhere in the hands of the people. 
They bring with them aspirations after liberty. There 
is a general craving of unsatisfied desires, — an uni- 
versal uneasiness under the control of ancient dynas- 
ties and established systems. Each succeeding change 
and modification in the forms of European government 
is narrowing the prerogative of hereditary rulers, and 
throwing more power into the hands of the people ; — 
and the people, intoxicated with these first delicious 
draughts of hberty, hke Homer's giant draining the 
bowls of Ulysses, still cries, in a voice which shakes the 
monarchs of Europe on their thrones, " More ! give me 
more ! " 

The same craving of the people for power demands 
that knowledge should be dealt out to them in the 
cheapest and most accessible forms. Popular asso- 
ciations for the diffusion of knowledge, aided by me- 
chanical improvements in the press and in the produc- 



tion of its materials, are everywhere contributing to 
this great end. The price of a venerable folio a few 
years since, now furnishes a moderate library of mod- 
ern duodecimos ; and penny magazines, pamphlets, and 
newspapers are almost gratuitously distributing light 
and intelligence into the veriest outskirts and corners of 
society. The learned are no longer a class separated 
from the rest of the world. In the most enlightened 
countries of Europe, and more emphatically in Ameri- 
ca, it may be said that all men are lettered. Degrees of 
learning only distinguish them, — and in respect of 
literary wealth, as with the wealth of commerce, the 
ranks of society now rise by insensible gradation, from 
the yeoman who gleans his scanty and occasional re- 
past out of some weekly newspaper, to those prodigies 
of learning quaintly termed walking libraries, whose 
hves have been spent in accumulating untold treasures. 
But the mass of mankind, in their present state of intel- 
lectual developement, are like children first let into the 
rudiments of knowledge ; incapable of abstract reason- 
ing, unable to rehsh refinements of literature, yet eager 
for novelty and curious of facts, — plain, downright, 
palpable, substantial knowledge, adapted to their ca- 
pacities, and not greatly elevated above their standard 
of taste. As the tendencies of the age are all popular, 
the energies of human intellect have been mainly di- 
rected to the conquest of the material world, where 
every trophy tells ; and physical science has put in 
requisition all her infinite resources to eff'ect those 
wonderful discoveries and amazing mechanical inven- 
tions, which are the striking phenomena of the times. 
In all the subdivisions of natural philosophy vast ac- 
cessions have been made, and are yet making, to the 
immense stores accumulated in the hands of successive 
generations from the moment that letters were invent- 



6 

ed to record the knowledge and transmit the experi- 
ence of man. To say nothing of others, the geogra- 
pher has extended the hmit of his knowledge almost 
as far as seems practicable to man, and is yet laboring, 
through regions of thick-ribbed ice and burning sand, 
to accomplish the perfect exhibition and description of 
the whole terraqueous globe ; and astronomy has not 
only unravelled the intricate motions of the nearer 
hghts of heaven, demonstrating the immutable perfec- 
tion of the laws which govern and hold together the 
whole planetary system, but has penetrated far into 
regions of undiscovered space, and brought new and 
unknown systems of luminaries to the eye of man, 
seeming to extend by her far gaze the unfathomable 
depths of infinity, and to multiply the already countless 
multitudes of visible worlds. There is observable, too, 
a growing disposition, under the influence perhaps of 
sound philosophy, to reduce every thing in nature to 
the operation of mechanical causes. The chemist, for 
example, begins to suspect that the laws of his science, 
heretofore held to be peculiar, depend merely on the 
mechanical action of particles infinitely minute, yet vari- 
ous in size and shape, composing the substances which 
he analyzes and compounds. Even the intellectual 
philosophy of the day partakes of this tendency. Not 
only has the metaphysician begun to pause upon ulti- 
mate facts, but a new school has arisen, now neither 
small nor contemptible ; their master, at least, who 
sleeps in yonder cemetery, "by strangers honored and 
by strangers mourned," was esteemed, by those who 
knew and loved him, no unphilosophical observer of 
mankind ; — yet these men teach, that the very ope- 
rations of the soul are in some measure effects of 
mechanical causes. They tell us, that the human brain 
is a species of thinking machine, or rather a combina- 



tion of machines ; and, pointing out minute portions of 
its organized substance, some 

" In shape no bigger than an agate-stone 
On the forefinger of an alderman," 

confidently declare, that this little structure contains 
all the delicate watchwork which tunes the poet's 
numbers, and that the complicated apparatus which 
enables the astronomer to span the heavens and the 
earth. 

The same influences characterize the literature of the 
day, which is therefore chiefly concerned in the narra- 
tion of facts. History, travels, biography, descriptions 
of the earth, its various regions and productions, the 
materials of which it is composed, the creatures which 
dwell on its surface and in its depths, these, with trea- 
tises more or less developing the principles of natural 
and mechanical science, and accounts of its discoveries 
and inventions, form the great bulk of modern literary 
productions. Add to these, treatises on government, 
laws, political economy, education, means of difl"using 
knowledge and improving the condition of the peo- 
ple, and you have almost the whole of the greater 
hterature of the time. If you look for modern belles- 
lettres, you must go to the reviews, the magazines, and 
the literary newspapers. The fine arts, even those 
partaking somewhat of mechanism, as painting and 
sculpture, may be said to exist rather than to flourish. 
Poetry, where is it 1 The drama, how is it degraded ! 
Oratory, what a garrulous narrator of solid facts is it 
become ! The only imaginative class of composition, 
which seems really called for by the taste of the times, 
is the historical romance, the great literary invention of 
our day ; and this, perhaps, owes its popularity in part 
to the slight admixture of fact which seasons a volume 
of fable, as well as to the extraordinary enchantment 



8 

breathed into its texture by the genius of its wonderful 
inventor. 

The great characteristic of our literature, then, is its 
plain, direct, practical utility. What 7 is this your sub- 
ject of complaint ? Not exactly. The complaint is not, 
that most of our hterature is plainly, directly, and prac- 
tically useful, but that there is something too much of 
this for the entire body of a hterature ; and that, as a 
whole, it wants the proportion, grace, beauty, gran- 
deur, and expression, which belong to the literature 
of other periods. Not that it is too useful, but that it 
takes too narrow a view of utility ; and that it would 
in truth be far more useful to man, as a moral and 
intellectual being, if it consulted refinement of taste 
and elevation of sentiment, as much as it informs the 
understanding and enlarges the circle of knowledge. 
It is a healthy and substantial hterature in the main, 
answering most, but by no means all the purposes of 
life. Wholly to discard the ornamental and the imagi- 
native from our intellectual being is much hke reduc- 
ing animal nature from the luxuries of civilization to the 
bare necessaries of hfe. Man may subsist on acorns, 
like the brutes that perish. He may clothe himself 
in their skins, instead of the costly fabrics of modern 
luxury. Their dens would afford him shelter; — why 
should he build piles of masonry? Because, hving hke 
a brute, he becomes brutal. And on the other hand he 
is so civilized and humanized, we may say, by luxury, 
that the highest degree of refinement in the arts of life 
which is consistent with the moral energy of man, and 
leaves him a free agent, is that which conducts him to 
his acme of physical perfection. Does not the analogy 
hold in respect to the food and raiment of the mind ? 
Imagine, if you can, the literature of our language all 
cut down to the literal narration of facts and statement 



of truths in plain, intelligible parts of speech. Perhaps 
we should not be justified in saying that what remain- 
ed was utterly useless ; but surely this poor, mangled, 
mutilated trunk would bear no better comparison, for 
usefulness as well as for beauty, with the luxuriant and 
varied growth of the whole eloquent literature of Eng-^ 
land, than the life of the savage does to that of civilized 
man in all its comfort and elegancy of refinement. It 
is, — but I forbear; — to press this argument would 
but insult the audience I address. 

To this hijper -practical character of the literature of 
this century may be added its revolutionary spirit, 
analogous to that which pervades the political world. 
In the universal freedom of inquiry and ardor of reform, 
nothing is so respectable as to command veneration ; 
nothing so sacred as to escape rude handling. Men 
seem to fear legitimacy in letters almost as much as in 
civil and religious government. All authority is ques- 
tionable. All restraint intolerable. Criticism has no 
principles ; art no rules. Those classical idols which 
were once superstitiously worshipped, and afterwards, 
with juster appreciation, esteemed worthy of all admi- 
ration and respect, are now, by the many, disdainfully 
trodden to the earth. Chaos broods over the ruins. 
Every man of moderate genius strikes out for himself a 
new system, and enacts his own laws. Take the lead- 
ing poets, for example, who have flourished within the 
present century. Shakspeare and Pope were not more 
dissimilar in the structure of their poetry than any two 
of these cotemporaries. What have they in common, 
besides the novelty of their systems, and consentane- 
ous departure from the elder schools ? They have 
each their respective adherents and admirers. But 
which of them has with him the voice of the whole 
literary public ? For inventive prose, Scott stands 
2 



10 

unique in his excellence, with the extraordinary merit of 
having given birth to a new species of fiction which com- 
mends itself to universal approbation. He has in truth 
founded a school ; which, besides the models of the 
master, has already sent into the world many agreeable 
productions of secondary genius, as well as a vast heap 
of intolerable trash. There is good writing, it must be 
acknowledged, in much of the plain business composi- 
tion of the day, the narrative and the argumentative. 
But, quitting this for the more ambitious kinds of com- 
position, we find the great mass of modern fine writing, 
from Bulwer's novels down to Blackwood's Magazine, 
worthy of all condemnation for its vile and vitiated 
taste both in sentiment and diction ; — a false, glaring, 
exaggerated, startling style, adapted, it may be, for 
popular effect, but making the judicious grieve. And 
this may be set down for the first fruits of the revo- 
lutionary spirit in literature. 

The tendencies of the age naturally develope them- 
selves strongly in this republican soil. 

The great ancient philosopher of England observed, 
that " in the youth of a state arms do flourish ; in the 
middle age of a state, learning; and then both of them 
together for a time. In the declining age of a state, the 
mechanical arts and merchandise." But what would 
Bacon have said to the prospects of a nation, which 
stepped into being an armed adult ; born with the wis- 
dom of age ; a formed language already on her tongue ; 
the whole hterature and science of an ancient state 
delivered into her hands to use as her own ; and in- 
stantly pushing, with the vigor of youth, to a degree 
of perfection in the mechanical arts and commerce, 
which rivals that of the oldest and wealthiest kingdoms 
of the earth ? The destinies of such a nation are a 
new problem in the history of man. It may be, that she 



11 

will abuse her great gifts. It may be, that she is des- 
tined to terminate a short and brilliant career by some 
suicidal dismemberment of her great territory ; by in- 
ternal dissensions and civil wars ; by sudden and blind 
abandonment of the great principles on which her ex- 
istence was founded ; by some Agrarian sweep of de- 
mocracy, desolating and subverting the whole fabric of 
society ; or by passive acquiescence in the gradual 
encroachments of arbitrary power and official corrup- 
tion. But in vain do we look for that premature de- 
crepitude, those symptoms of gradual and necessary 
decay, which a high degree of perfection in commerce 
and the useful arts was anciently supposed to indicate. 
Starting with these as the gifts of infancy, or the at- 
tainments of the first steps in our national existence, if 
that existence be not suddenly and violently termi- 
nated by our own hands, if the growth of the nation is 
indeed to be commensurate with her territory, and the 
whole of this vast continent to be filled with one re- 
publican people, experience cannot tell, nor imagination 
conceive, the pitch of greatness and glory, civilization, 
knowledge, and power, to which the genius of such a 
people, wisely directed by efficient and hberal systems 
of education, in letters as well as science, might not 
be conducted in the long progress of prosperous and 
honorable years. 

It was the remark of another philosophic observer 
of human affairs, that " a republic is most favorable 
to the growth of the sciences, and a civilized monar- 
chy to that of the polite arts." A reason is assigned. 
It is, that in a republic talent looks downward to the 
people for its reward, and therefore seeks to become 
useful ; while in a monarchy it looks upward, through 
successive gradations of arbitrary ranks, to the throne 
as the ultimate fountain of honor, and therefore aims 



is 

at the agreeable. Hume had, no more than Bacon, 
the example of America to guide his inductions. But, 
if our progress to the present point of our history had 
been spread before his eyes, would it have brought his 
mind to a different conclusion ? Would he not rather 
have derived from it corroboration of his theory 1 
Has it not been true, from the first to the present mo- 
ment of our pohtical existence, that the governing 
principle which pervades all our institutions, charac- 
terizes all our pursuits, and moulds the whole habit of 
society, is direct utiUty to the great body of the peo- 
ple ? And, wisely understood, ought it not to be true ? 
Is it not the very essence of the theory of our govern- 
ment '? Is it not true also, and a probable consequence 
from the admitted truth, that our attainments in sci- 
ence, and especially in those departments of science 
which bear most directly on the practical business of 
life, have been far more considerable than our attain- 
ments in literature, and what are termed the polite arts. 
The day has indeed gone by when we were taunt- 
ingly asked who ever heard of an American book. 
The day has not yet arrived when we could reason- 
ably be required to exhibit a body of literature to com- 
pare with that of nations who were ancient at our 
birth. It may at least be said, without vanity, that such 
hterature as we have is generally respectable of its 
kind ; that much of it will bear favorable comparison 
with similar Hterature abroad ; while some has re- 
ceived the imprimatur of European approbation. On 
the other hand may it not be conceded, that during the 
half-century of our existence we have produced little, 
and of that Htde nothing which we ourselves esteem a 
great national work, on which we would willingly stake 
our reputation as rivalling the best literary productions 
of the same period abroad ? We shall not indeed be 



13 

asked who has ever heard of an American artist, so 
long as some of the most eminent of the artists in 
England are and have been Americans. But is not 
the fact of their voluntary exile the most flagrant of 
proofs that genius in the fine arts is not yet sufficiently 
rewarded at home ? On the other hand take a brief 
retrospect of the effects of American science during 
the same fifty years, and especially of physical and 
mechanical science. Do you ask, what has America 
done for science ? Where are the monuments of her 
skill ? Look abroad over her vast continent ; consider 
the magnitude of her growth in this litde point of time; 
her feebleness, her poverty, her destitution of internal 
resources but fifty years ago, and now her wealth and 
strength, her commerce, her manufactures, her agri- 
cultural product, her cities, her mines, her roads, her 
canals, her rivers and lakes covered with steam-boats, 
the ocean with her ships, and reflect how much of sci- 
ence is involved in the contrivance and conduct of this 
vast and complicated machinery, and how much of this 
unexampled exhibition of national prosperity is the 
direct consequence of mechanical ingenuity and the 
skilful application of physical philosophy to the business 
of fife. Ask what America has done ! Why, passing 
by all minor matters, the successful application of steam 
to locomotion, begun in America, here perfected for 
purposes of navigation, extended in England recently 
to movements upon land, is the single great invention 
of the age, Hkely to produce a change as momentous 
in the relations of human aff'airs, as the invention of 
gunpowder or the mariner's compass. A whole con- 
tinent traversed by men and merchandise in less time 
than it took in the days of Pericles to communicate 
between Athens and Sparta, or in the time of Eliza- 
beth to send a courier from London to Edinburgh! 



14 

It is in effect as if all the wealth, power, and population, 
spread over this immense territory, were drawn into 
the narrow compass of the Grecian Peloponnesus, or 
the httle island of England, or the spot called Massa- 
chusetts. Whither then are fled the imagined difl[i- 
culties and dangers of governing a wide-spread repub- 
hc ? Extent of territory ceases to be weakness. 
Magnitude is no longer unwieldy. Distance is scarcely 
separation. For, in relation to extent of empire, the 
true inquiry should be not how many miles, but how 
many hours is it from place to place ; — and, if we 
would form some adequate idea of the amazing pro- 
gress of this cementing and consolidating principle, 
facihty of intercourse, take a single fact for illustration. 
At the commencement of our revolution, Washington 
moved to the command of the American armies, from 
Philadelphia to the very place where we are now 
assembled, with all the expedition which the means of 
the country could afford for himself and his train, and 
with no unusual cause of delay beyond a few hours of 
necessary retardation on the road in briefly declining 
the proffered civilities of places through which he 
passed, and he reached this point of his destination on 
the twelfth day from his departure ; — the twelfth day ! 
Even his despatches to Congress by single messengers, 
resting neither day nor night, were five or six days 
traversing this route ; — and the same journey would 
now have been accomplished by the aid of the Ameri- 
can steam-boat, moving without intermission and with- 
out fatigue, in less than thirty hours ; — and this time, 
short as it is, seems not unlikely to be reduced one 
half, when the British application of the same locomotive 
power shall have been extended by rail-roads over the 
whole route. What an union and concentration is this 
of the scattered energies of a vast republic ! But what 



15 

have we done in literature, or the polite arts, which, 
on comparison with European productions, we would 
name in the same day with these effects of mechanical 
science ? 

Let us admit then, that, so far as our short history 
can enlighten us, the tendency of our government is 
strongly, most strongly, to foster the useful, and ne- 
glect what is termed for distinction's sake the orna- 
mental of life. And must it not be so 1 not so much 
for the somewhat fanciful reason of Hume, that talent 
looks downward in a republic and upward in a monar- 
chy, as from the equal distribution of property among 
us. It is wealth, not monarchy, which begets luxury ; 
superfluous accumulated wealth, permanent in the 
same hands, hereditary and entailed, educating a race 
capable of appreciating, with the means of indulging 
in expensive refinements ; this it is, which creates an 
atmosphere genial to the fine arts. And literature of 
the higher kinds, that which is adapted to the gratifi- 
cation of the highly cultivated few, and not to the 
necessities of the many, a great, a magnificent national 
hterature, rests on the same foundation. 

All the habits of society with us are formed and con- 
trolled by these causes. We are pushed rapidly for- 
ward at an early age into active scenes ; immersed 
before maturity in the business of life. There we are 
all working men, engaged in plain, practical pursuits. 
Commerce and navigation, manufactures, civil engineer- 
ing, and the professions, with education pursued as a 
business, I had almost said as a trade, and that mostly 
as a thing by the way, a temporary pursuit, a step to 
some more lucrative employment, — these, with the 
editing of newspapers, take up nearly the whole culti- 
vated intellect of the country. Poets, painters, sculp- 
tors, scholars, those mere ministers to luxury, men to 



16 

whom letters and the fine arts are a primary pursuit, 
where are they as a class ? Individuals enough emi- 
nent in these pursuits may industriously be found, just 
to mark the more strongly the truth of the general pro- 
position. They are not one of our classes of society. 
Wealth is not the American mammon, as has been 
charged upon us, more than it is the idol of all other 
commercial countries. It is the most general pursuit of 
civilized man. But it may be confessed without shame, 
that under our simple institutions there are fewer ob- 
jects than in many countries to divide its natural sway. 
Its impulses and workings he not more in the depths, 
but do they not lie more upon the surface of society ? 
The machinery is bared to the eye ; it has no more real 
power than if it were concealed by the most beautiful 
decorations of Grecian or Parisian art. But shall we 
not study that graceful concealment ? To add beauty 
to strength, to adorn the useful, and give grace to pow- 
er, these are what letters and the fine arts do for a 
commercial people. Without them society loses its re- 
finement, and man becomes gross and unspiritual. 

If the views which have been taken are not radi- 
cally unsound, we stand in peril, in imminent peril, of 
this degradadon. There are strong influences upon 
us adverse to refinement. The passing spirit of the 
age is by no means favorable to high literary cultiva- 
tion ; the fixed tendency of our political institutions 
seems to be altogether against it ; and there is no natu- 
ral buoyancy in our society capable by itself of resist- 
ing this accumulated pressure. What, then, is to be 
done? Shall we succumb? Shall we yield without 
an effort to the natural sway of things, and suffer our- 
selves to be borne, like straws upon the current, whith- 
ersoever it may tend? Why not? It is destiny, inev- 
itable desdny. The times, interest, opinion, the insti- 



17 

tutions under which we are nurtured, the very atmo- 
sphere we breathe, compel us to our fate. What is 
there to arrest the downward course, if such it be ? I 
answer, Education, — education ! There is no other 
power under heaven, and this, rightly directed, is the 
power all-sufficient to wipe out the deep stigma, or 
avert the unutterable reproach, of being what we might 
otherwise one day become, first doubtless among the 
nations in the airy freedom of our institutions, first per- 
haps in magnitude, population, wealth, first probably in 
that ruder knowledge and practical ingenuity which re- 
gards only the physical comfort of man, and yet possi- 
bly last of the human race in social refinement and in- 
tellectual supremacy. 

But it is not popular education (the cry of the 
times) which will do this. It is not a superficial dif- 
fusion of knowledge among the whole body of the 
people. What ! discourage popular education ? stop 
the diffusion of knowledge among the people, — the 
people of an unmixed republic ? Madness indeed ! 
No; — would to God that at this critical moment 
every freeman in America were, not only able to 
read and write his native tongue, as I trust all are, 
but so educated as to comprehend clearly the princi- 
ples of the constitution under which he hves ; to be 
sensitive of its inestimable value ; to feel instinctively 
the first noiseless step of encroachment ; to scent usur- 
pation from afar; to distinguish the warnings of patri- 
otism from the clamor of faction ; and to know by the 
Hght of other days the true meaning of those insidious 
sounds on the lips of a popular favorite, — Jlppellamus 
ad popidum, appellamiis ad populum! Music for the 
many ; to the alarmed and fearful patriot, who reads 
the page of history, a raven voice, croaking the down- 
fall of liberty ! 

3 



18 

It" equal intelligence could be distributed among 
men, not by levelling to the lowest, but by eleva- 
ting all to the highest, — and such equality of intel- 
lect could be made commensurate and coextensive 
with civil rights, — then indeed might we realize the 
golden dream of a perfect commonwealth. But be- 
ware, beware in education above all things, of that com- 
mon bane of democracy, the desire to equalize by lev- 
elling. All men cannot be educated alike. God and 
nature, the accidents and destinies of life, forbid it. 
Let not the standard of education, then, be wholly 
adapted, as I fear it is too much among us, to the mid- 
dling demands and ability of men. You might almost 
as well adapt it to the lowest. For the principle 
tends downward, and still downward ; and in the 
lowest deep a lower still appears. Would you say 
there shall be no instruction in our land which a pau- 
per cannot purchase 1 It is a practical absurdity ; and, 
since all cannot be educated alike, let some at least, in 
the name of patriotism, be carried to the highest point 
of cultivation of which the human soul is susceptible. 
Let there be light. Let it beam from the hill-tops, if 
we can bring ourselves to admit that there are any in 
a republic. Thence it must spread, irradiating the 
whole atmosphere of liberty ; gilding the farm-house 
no less than the mansioli of luxury ; cheering and illu- 
minating at his daily toil the humblest laborer who tills 
the soil of the valley. If this be unpopular, God save 
the Commonwealth ! 

I am concerned, not for the education of the peo- 
ple, at least here in New England ; for our fathers 
gloriously provided for it, the energies of all classes 
are at this moment nobly directed towards it, and 
the people themselves loudly demand it. I am con- 
cerned rather for the education of those who are des- 



19 

tined to be the lights of" the people ; for there is the 
weak spot. Without stopping now to inquire what 
the defect is, whether the insufficiency of our schools, 
the want of adequate endowments for our colleges, 
or whatever other cause, the fact is, that such an edu- 
cation as many enlightened parents desire for their 
children is not to be bought in America. Perhaps it 
will be said that it is to be bought nowhere. But I deny 
that the youths of America, whh the most expensive 
education which their country affords, enter life upon 
a par with the best educated youths of Europe, in re- 
spect of Hterary attainment. Is not this true 1 I ap- 
peal, to you, judges of the fact, who have followed let- 
ters abroad and at home. Is this the necessary con- 
sequence of our republican institutions? You will not 
admit it. Is it our poverty ? That plea would have 
answered fifty years ago. Has education, then, of the 
highest class advanced propordonately to our wealth 
and means and luxury of Uving 1 I fear not. I greatly 
fear, that there is no other essential requisite of true 
national greatness in which we may now so justly shrink 
from proud comparison with the proudest nations of 
the earth, as this of accomplished education, — liberal, 
enlightened, thorough classical education. 

The learning of the ancient languages especially is 
far too much neglected, in the present fashion of the 
times, for the class of whom I speak. What ! these 
neglected? Are not our boys plodding through Greek 
and Latin from the time they can read Enghsh till they 
enter our universities ? Has not the standard of ad- 
mission as to those studies been raised within twenty 
years ? Is not the course of reading there greatly ex- 
tended ? Granted. I grant it all. And yet I fear the 
truth of an assertion which I have elsewhere heard, that 
at any time within these same twenty years, the head 



20 

boy at Eton or Westminster has been more accurately 
instructed in the niceties of these languages, and more 
thoroughly imbued with the spirit of classical learning, 
than any youth, — who has entered, shall I say ? no, 
for it would not truly represent the remark, — but who 
has graduated at either of our universities within the 
term. Does this sound ungraciously ? Perhaps it may. 
But is it not true ? — or at least a near approximation 
to the truth ? For I go for the truth in this grave mat- 
ter ; the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If it 
be so, let us know it. I fear not what foreigners may 
say of us ; I fear more the fact and its consequences ; 
and if it be a fact, instead of smothering it in a corner 
from fear for our reputation, from fear for that reputa- 
tion I would have it cried in the streets, proclaimed 
from the house-tops, till every American man and boy 
had become sensible of the fact, and alive to the deep 
shame which it involves. Deny it, defend it, or re- 
form it. 

But, dismissing foreign comparisons, have we in truth 
advanced in classical learning 1 From what period ? 
Had not our Alma Mater, before the Revolution, 
scholars more accurate in the learned languages than 
she has had since? At what time since would it have 
been easy to have drawn from her classical storehouse 
as many and as good specimens of Latin and Greek 
as are collected in the Pietas et Gratulatio of 1760? 
Are the young men of the present day as familiar with 
the classical authors of antiquity as are some of the best 
educated of those who w^ere educated even soon after 
the Revolution ? Or is there among them that regard 
for the learning of the ancient languages, and that ar- 
dor for classical literature, which distinguished the more 
recent days of Buckminster, and Thacher, and others 
whom I could name ? No one pretends it. On the 



21 

contrary we are told, in extenuation of the fact, that 
great advancement has been made in other things, 
which is true ; that more of Greek and Latin reading 
is absolutely required at the University than formerly, 
which is also true ; and that the scheme of education 
in this particular is upon the whole fitted for the wants 
of the country, — against which I protest. 

Some, who perhaps do fear what foreigners may say 
of us more than the fact, defend our national reputation 
on this score by questioning the utility of this ex- 
tremely accurate study of ancient and dead languages. 
Others, infected with the revolutionary spirit of the 
times, are for abolishing these studies altogether, under 
the idea of substituting what they term useful and 
practical knowledge. Useful and practical knowledge ! 
What do they mean by it? Is nothing useful to the 
world, or practical in life, of which all mankind cannot 
measure the utility, and which every man, Avoman, and 
child cannot practically use? Will they have their 
sons taught to steer the plough, then, or hold the helm ? 
By no means. Yet nothing can be more useful ; no- 
thing more practical. Honorable, highly honorable are 
these vocations too in their place ; and Heaven be 
thanked, that many a man in this community, who drove 
the plough in his youth along his father's corn-field, or 
hazarded his life as a poor cabin-boy upon the ocean, 
now stands honored and respected in the high places 
of society. Ay, you cannot look long, nor far, with- 
out seeing some one of these happy sons of freedom, 
whose name, it may be, is not unknown among the 
greatly scientific of the earth, or whose eloquence per- 
haps reaches the hearts of his countrymen in the far- 
thest corners of the continent, and strikes across the 
Atlantic even on the ear of statesmen watchful of man- 
kind. For, that which has been cast as a reproach upon 



22 

democracy, is it not in truth its highest glory 1 that " it 
is a boundless field of ambition, which excludes no in- 
dividual from the utmost extravagance of hope." But 
do these self-taught and after-educated men, who by 
their own Herculean strength have struggled to the top, 
tell us that they owe their greatness to the misfortunes 
and defects of their early education ? — that they owe 
it to this practical and useful knowledge of their youth? 
Is this their system ? Do they send their sons to the 
same schools? Are they not rather distinguished 
among the patrons of liberal institutions and the arts, 
— zealous among the advocates of broad and deep 
foundations in science and hterature ? 

But it will be said, that this violent translation of the 
terms useful and practical knowledge does not fairly 
represent the views of the dissenters from classical 
learning, who would propose the substitution of other 
liberal and intellectual acquisitions. Surely it does not. 
It jumps to the extreme. And there is doubtless room 
for fair argument upon a question which has been often 
argued, — unsuccessfully always for the reform. But I 
do not propose to go into that wide argument. Time 
would faik The repetition would but enfeeble what 
others have enforced ; and it would be mere superero- 
gation; for, by the judgment and practice of mankind, 
the estabhshed course of education here and elsewhere, 
and the opinions probably of all whom I address (for I 
confine my remarks to the education of a class only of 
society), the point may be assumed as settled, and for 
the present not to be disturbed. These languages are 
to be studied to some extent. I rather choose, there- 
fore, to meet those who question the advantage of an 
extremely accurate and extensive study of them. Not 
that every man needs to be a Porson or a Parr ; nor is 
he likely to be by the mere course of a school and col- 



23 

lege education, however excellent and accurate it may 
have been ; at least we are not yet in a condition to 
make it needful to guard against dangers of that nature. 
Not that it is essential lor the merchant, or the manu- 
facturer, to be a deeply read scholar ; although he will 
make neither poorer voyages, nor worse broadcloths, 
for his learning ; certainly not for having learnt accu- 
rately in his youth that which was offered him to learn. 
But the fair question is of the purposes of the great 
bulk of those, who are the usual subjects of what 
is esteemed a complete liberal education. To which 
of them is it not advantageous, that the ancient lan- 
guages should have been learnt accurately, if at all ? 

Probably it will be conceded on all hands, that 
the chief object of primary education is not know- 
ledge, but discipline, and facihties for acquiring know- 
ledge. The absolute knowledge of things which the 
boy learns out of his school-books is next to nothing, 

— scarcely more in a course of years than the man 
of full-grown and well- trained faculties might acquire 
in as many months. The object then is rather to 
create habits of application ; to call into action that 
greatest principle of all human greatness, attention ; to 
give a command of the faculties, to such degree of in- 
vestigation as their tender expansion will permit ; to 
enlarge and strengthen them by judicious exercise; — 
and for this purpose language is selected, as being by 
God's own appointment more easily learnt in youth 
than in maturer years ; and a foreign language, because 
it is of necessity learnt in a more exact manner, and 
with greater intension of the mind, than our vernacular 
tongue. But surely accuracy in this learning is the 
whole evidence that the end for which it was learnt at 
all has been attained. The attention has been roused, 

— the faculties have been stretched ; and therefore the 



24 

knowledge of those things towards which the mind was 
directed is accurate. The more accurate, the stronger 
is this evidence. 

And since the object is not so much knowledge, 
as the means of knowledge, the command of pow- 
ers, and use of tools, the Greek and Latin langua- 
ges are selected by common consent, not only for 
the immortal treasures they contain, but because 
they incorporate themselves into all the living lan- 
guages of civilized man ; so that he, who has once 
mastered these ancient vehicles of thought, descends, 
as from an eminence, how familiarly, compared with 
the mere vernacular scholar, into all or any of the 
dialects of modern Europe, and, which is of more im- 
portance, better understands his own. For we can- 
not read a single page, nor utter a sohtary sen- 
tence, in our native language, (the very words I am 
compelled to use, the single page, the solitary sen- 
tence, the native language, speak to the fact,) with- 
out recurring to Rome, or Greece, or both, for most 
of the nice shades of thought which mingle and co- 
alesce in the full meaning of every phrase that is ut- 
tered. Thence is it, that " even as a hawk fleeth not 
high with one wing, even so a man reacheth not unto 
excellency with one tongue." The ancient instructor 
of royalty whom I quote would have had for its fellow 
a learned tongue at least, doubtless httle better than 
Heathen Greek. But are not the ends for which these 
languages are selected, in preference to all others, 
answered precisely in proportion to the accuracy with 
which they are learnt ? And shall we, above all things, 
stop short of that point of accuracy which alone gives 
the power to perceive with clearness the beauties of 
the thought and the dehcacies of expression they 
contain ? Shall we learn a httle of language, and stop 
short of its hterature ? 



25 

So far from doubting the advantage of the critical 
accuracy of Europe, and especially of England, in this 
branch of education, the more rational doubt is that 
of some of the sweeping reformers, whether there be 
any benefit, or at least a benefit proportioned to the 
time and labor consumed, in learning these languages 
so superficially and inaccurately as we for the most 
part do. For of what avail is it to talk of the simple 
majesty of Homer, or the deep pathos of Sophocles, to 
him who scarce reads with any tolerable fluency the 
mere character in which their works are written, and 
knows no more of the genius of their language than he 
does of the genius of the Cherokee? Yet of how 
many, who have received the advantages of what is 
termed a liberal education, is this literally true ! 

Accurate knowledge of the ancient languages use- 
less ! A waste of life to spend its best years on syl- 
lables and sounds, — mere names of things and those 
dead and forgotten ! Rather let us say, that it is a 
waste of life to stop short of accuracy ; — that language 
is thought, and the memory of words the memory of 
things. For God and nature have so mysteriously 
mingled body and soul, thought and expression, that 
man cannot set them asunder. They are one and in- 
divisible. The principle of intellectual hfe hangs upon 
their union. We cannot think but in words. We 
cannot reason but in propositions. Or if the excited 
intellect should sometimes leap to an intuitive result 
and flash upon truth, it is yet a useless result, an un- 
utterable, incommunicable, voiceless truth, — a waste 
flower in the wilderness, — a gem buried in the ocean, 
— until it has been embodied in language, and made 
visible by signs, or audible by sounds. And however 
it may be rarely true that the man of accurate thought 
is incapable, because he has not studied language, of 
4 



26 

accurate expression, it is universally true that he who 
has greatly studied accuracy of expression, words, 
their arrangement, force, and harmony, in any language, 
dead or hving, has also gready attained towards accu- 
racy of thought, as well as propriety and energy of 
speech. " For divers philosophers hold," says Shak- 
speare, clothing philosophy in the mantle of the Muse, 
" that the lip is parcel of the mind." 

A waste of life! Why, what is man, his pursuits, his 
works, his monuments, that these niceties of language, 
the weight of words, and the value of sounds should 
be deemed unworthy of his immortal nature ? He is 
fled like a shadow. The wealth M'hich he toiled for is 
squandered by other hands. The lands which he cul- 
tivated are waste. That hearth-stone on which he 
garnered up the affections of his own home is sunk 
into the elements. The very marble, which his chil- 
dren raised over his ashes for a memorial unto eternity, 
is scattered to the winds of heaven. His sons, his 
kindred, his name, his race, his nation, all their mighty 
works, their magnificent monuments, their imperial cit- 
ies, are vanished like a mist, and swept out of the 
memory of man. Yet the very word that he spoke, 
— that httle winged word, — a breath, a vapor, gone 
as it was uttered, clothing a new and noble thought, 
embodying one spark of heaven's own fire, formed into 
letters, traced in hairy lines upon a leaf, enrolled, cop- 
ied, printed, multiplied and multiphed, spreads over 
the whole earth ; is heard among all tongues and 
nations ; descends through all posterity ; and fives for 
ever, immortal as his own soul. Homer and ye sacred 
prophets, attest this truth ! 

There is one view of this subject so peculiar for us, 
so national, so practical, that it conveys to my mind an 
irresistible feeling, that in this country, more than all 



27 

others, the learning of the ancient languages should be 
deeply cuUivated. It is for its effect upon eloquence. 

Never was there a great nation, since the extinction 
of the liberties of Rome, so peculiarly fitted for the 
developement of eloquence as these United States 
of America. We have been humorously called a 
logocracy. There ma}'- be ridicule in the term, but 
there is truth in the thought. We are indeed a nation 
of speechifiers. The pulpit speaks hovi' copiously ! The 
bar how interminably ! Every public event of fesdvity, 
or condolence, is the occasion of meedngs throughout 
the Union, and every meeting the occasion of a speech. 
Anniversary celebrations, like our own, are everywhere 
holden for the mere purpose of a speech. Whoever 
has any thing to propose for the acdon of others, begins 
it by calling a meeting and making a speech. The 
halls of Congress, the State legislatures, the primary 
meetings of the people, frequent elections, constant 
caucuses. State conventions, special conventions of 
pardcular interests and classes, town meedngs, parish 
meetings, meetings of corporadons innumerable and of 
private associations for all imaginable objects, are but so 
many theatres of speech ; in which, daily and hourly, 
affairs more or less momentous are freely and fully de- 
bated, deliberated upon, voted upon, and so setded as 
it were by the power of the parts of speech. If this 
species of manufacture had required either encourage- 
ment or protecdon, those who are curious in such sta- 
tisdcal arithmetic would doubdess have told us, and the 
world would have been astonished at the result, what 
millions of speeches are produced annually by these 
thirteen millions of people, and what in America is the 
daily average consumption of speech. 

But if this too savour of ridicule, turn for a moment 
to the amazing effects which have thus been wrought 



2d 

upon society. What lit up the flame of the American 
Revolution ? What spread it hke wildfire over thirteen 
unconnected colonies ? What linked them together 
in the great bond of the Federal Constitution ? What 
but the spirit-stirring eloquence of the leading patriots 
of those days ? Yes, " I do say," (using the words of 
one of the most distinguished among them), "I do say, 
that the oration of James Otis against writs of assist- 
ance breathed into this nation the breath of Hfe." 
This was the voice of New England. Virginia pro- 
claims her Patrick Henry as the great father of free- 
dom. But wheresoever, or by whomsoever, the first 
spark was struck, not a county, not a village was there 
in America, but had its httle senate deliberating upon 
wrongs and redress ; and orators everywhere, eloquent 
in the reality of their cause and the magnitude of their 
stake, roused the people into action. 

Look at wider eff'ects which yet flow from the same 
cause in the amazing progress of civil and religious 
liberty throughout Christendom. All Europe struggles 
for freedom. Nation after nation sees light and draws 
breath. Even Portugal and Spain, which but now seem- 
ed sunk, hopelessly sunk, in the fathomless abyss of ig- 
norance and superstition, are at length roused from their 
long lethargy, and move to their place among the consti- 
tutional nations of the earth. Did not the impulse pro- 
ceed from the voice of American eloquence ? Witness 
too the abolition of the slave-trade among all civilized 
nations. See the efforts everywhere making for the 
education of the people. Look at the astonishing re- 
form of temperance in our own time and land. These, 
and a thousand other beneficial influences of less ex- 
tent daily operating on society, are all effects of elo- 
quence in the cause of truth ; and mostly proceed 
from this habit of assembly, debate, and harangue. 



29 

which prevails in England far more than in any other 
nation of Europe, and in the United States of America 
more than in all the world beside. 

But this is not all. Eloquence, written and spoken, 
has been, is, and is to be, the great engine of this gov- 
ernment. For what is the essence of our govern- 
ment? Opinion. The government was built upon 
opinion. In this it Uves, and by this it must stand or 
fall. Yes, public opinion is the whole bond that binds 
together these thirteen millions of people. The Con- 
stitution is the great and venerable name under which 
it rallies. God preserve it ! But let public opinion be, 
that this union ought to be dissolved, and it is dis- 
solved, — eo ictu. It is fire to the flax. Your gov- 
ernment cannot stand a day against it. Not an insti- 
tution in the country can live an hour without it. Our 
property, our Uves, our liberties, all depend upon opin- 
ion. The laws and their ministers ! These indeed are 
our temporary safeguards. But what are they ? Mere 
instruments of the people. The people made them ; 
and in the majesty of their might the people can un- 
make them, per fas aut nefas, whenever public opinion 
shall justify or demand it. And by what is public 
opinion regulated and controlled ? By the voice and 
the press ; — reason, argument, persuasion ; and these 
are eloquence. 

Is it not then astonishing, when we see what mira- 
cles are daily wrought by the power of words, when 
we reflect that our whole government is based on pub- 
lic opinion, and that public opinion is wholly formed 
and directed by speech and the press, and consider how 
the whole habit of our society conforms to this neces- 
sary influence of republican institutions, and that writ- 
ing and speaking are the daily business of the nation, — 
is it not truly astonishing, that eloquence is not a study 



30 

among us, and that liberal education is not mainly direct- 
ed to that end ? Is it so ? Trace, for example's sake, 
the best education of a modern American lawyer from 
its beginning to his entrance upon professional practice. 
The boy goes to his first school, and what does he 
learn there ? To read 1 Not at all. He learns indeed 
the forms of letters, the manner in which they are 
combined into syllables and words, and the general 
meaning of the visible signs which he sees on a printed 
page. But does he learn the true sounds of those 
signs ? Does he commonly acquire distinct articula- 
tion, accurate pronunciation, or just emphasis 7 Does 
he get an ear for harmony, or any sense of tone and 
modulation ? Answer it, ye parents. No, none of 
these things does he learn there. He learns to read as 
it were for the eye, but not so to read as to convey to 
the ear of another any clear and distinct significancy 
of sound. But he has learned to read, and is sent to a 
more advanced school. For what ? To be fitted for 
college, as it is termed ; which seems to be regarded 
as the whole end of school education, and is commonly 
interpreted to mean the being taught just so Httle as 
will barely suffice for a brief examination in the least 
demands of the University. Without having learnt to 
read, he may perhaps have declaimed ; but how often 
with the effect only of .making bad habits worse, and 
acquiring new ones no better. He may have had 
some exercise in vrriting, perhaps ; but has he practi- 
cally acquired any knowledge of the accurate structure 
of a period, any notion of harmony and effect in com- 
position ? He has learnt something, of course, but 
httle enough, of the ancient languages ; has he the 
dimmest perception of the beauties they contain ? 
Has he been led to read even in his own language with 
any regard to style of composition ? So far from it, at 



31 

the University in most cases (there are of course 
exceptions to be found in our schools) he feels for 
the first time that speaking is a thing at all worthy 
of attention, and learns that the expression of his 
thoughts with accuracy and elegance in written com- 
position is an art of considerable importance as well 
as some difficulty. At the University, recentl}^, atten- 
tion is paid to these departments of instruction ; the 
youth makes progress in them, and makes farther 
progress in the ancient languages ; but during the 
same period his mind must be principally occupied 
in other departments of learning more proper for 
an University ; yet, out of such half-formed mate- 
rials, our diligent Alma Mater is expected to pro- 
duce to the world, in four short years, men accom- 
plished in Greek and Roman Literature, acquainted 
with modern languages, learned in all the sciences, 
able writers, and effective speakers. Even there ex- 
temporaneous composition and dehvery are not sub- 
jects either of instruction or practice ; and writing is 
an exercise of far too rare occurrence to create that 
facihty as well as accuracy of composition, which are 
indispensable to the formation of a good speaker. On 
quitting the University the graduate goes to the study 
of his profession. During that period of life his atten- 
tion is devoted exclusively to the acquisition of its 
elementary learning, and the forms of business. He 
receives no instruction, and commonly has no practice, 
either in writing, extemporizing, or declaiming. With 
such preparation he enters upon the practical duties of 
a forensic orator, and without any previously formed 
habit which enables him to compose accurately and 
rapidly, or to utter what he does compose with effect, 
all that he ever learns of these essentials he learns 
in the course of practice by the actual arguing of 



32 

causes ; — and in them, having enough to do with the 
study of the cause, the preparation of evidence and 
the investigation of law, he attends only to a cer- 
tain methodical arrangement of his brief, and bestows 
no special care on style of composition or manner of 
delivery. Indeed, manner cannot well be the subject 
of study while matter presses ; and an artificial man- 
ner assumed for the particular occasion would be sure 
to be ill put on, and betray itself so far as to be worse 
than mere neghgence. Yet surely the practice of 
speaking without either general or particular prepara- 
tion in style of composition and manner of dehvery, so 
common, I had almost said universal, cannot but lead 
to bad habits rather than good ones, and respectable 
mediocrity becomes at length the highest standard of 
excellence. 

Thus the whole art of oratory may be said to 
be utterly neglected among us, as a thing unwor- 
thy of manly pursuit ; and eloquence, when it ex- 
ists, to be regarded as a mere gift from heaven, 
instead of being, as it mainly is, a splendid acquisi- 
tion ; — a gift if you will, but a cultivated gift. For, 
not to enter upon an old metaphysical discussion, 
where the whole matter of dispute lies, as usual, 
in the definition of a term, it may be admitted that 
such thrilling and electrifying sublimity of eloquence 
as intensely moves the passions of men, and fills 
us with mingled admiration and awe, is the result 
in the first place of extraordinary gifts ; but on the 
other hand it may be safely insisted, that to enable the 
orator to use extraordinary powers, as well as that de- 
gree of power which is given to most men, with extra- 
ordinary eff'ect, there must have been long and severe 
training of the mind and study of his art. 



33 

A Patrick Henry may occasionally burst upon the 
world, seeming to be an orator by mere inspira- 
tion ; — but if the secret of his soul could be un- 
folded, and the workings of his mind from infancy 
could be laid before you visible to the eye, think 
you not there would be seen traces of severe disci- 
pline and deep study, — a habit of intense action in 
secret composition, — and probably some early course 
of reading, or intellectual conversation with gifted 
men, which had stored his memory with materials 
to work upon, and given him command of lan- 
guage 1 All that can be said of such prodigies is, 
that their mode of study and self-education has been 
peculiar, and that the magnitude of their natural gifts 
has enabled them, by great internal efforts, to use 
small acquisitions and small means for self- formation 
more effectually, than other men commonly use great 
acquisitions and great means. Or, if no other solution 
of the problem will satisfy the mind, let us admit that 
such beings, like children whose precocious powers, 
equalling or even exceeding those of the most culti- 
vated and accomphshed minds, have sometimes aston- 
ished mankind, are mere miracles, deviations from the 
ordinary course of God's providence. But systems of 
education are made for men, not monsters. And, upon 
a system of education adapted to that end, can it be 
reasonably doubted that all men, that is, all men of 
intelligence, and free from natural impediments, might 
acquire the faculty of composing and speaking with 
that degree of ease, perspicuity, and force, which we 
commonly call eloquence ? that most men might go 
far towards eloquence of the more moving kind ; 
while a few gifted, — gifted with the sensibility of the 
poet, as well as the penetration of the philosopher, — 

5 



34 

might reach that harrowing eloquence which speaks 
to the soul ? 

Does this seem visionary 1 Yet the fact is undenia- 
ble, that those moderns who have reached the loftiest 
height of eloquence (unless Patrick Henry, of whose 
system of self-education we know nothing but by vague 
tradition, be an exception,) have studied it profoundly; 
and that the great orators of antiquity, who Uve immor- 
tal in their works, as well as in traditionary fame, and 
whom no modern has yet equalled in the general esti- 
mation of mankind, were educated to this art from 
their infancy, and made it the business of their hves ; 
while we have many who make speaking their busi- 
ness, indeed, but few who make it their study, none 
who are educated for it as a primary end. And 
what are the purposes of a vast majority of those 
who leave our universities ? Whither are they des- 
tined 1 To the bar, the bench, the pulpit, the profes- 
sorships of your colleges, the high places of instruction 
throughout the land ; to become pleaders, preachers, 
teachers, authors, legislators, statesmen, public orators ; 
in all ways to guide, enlighten, and instruct the public 
mind. In a word, their essential object is to write well 
and to speak well ; or, in another word, eloquence ; 
power of composition and expression. For, however 
excellence in speaking ' and excellence in writing may 
otherwise differ, the same education, mainly, is adapt- 
ed for both. At least, the education of the orator 
includes that of the accomplished writer, superadding 
somewhat not undesirable for all educated men. 

Do any doubt whether the attainment of this great 
eloquence among us be desirable, and whether it be 
not capable of doing evil as well as good ? Do you 
ask if it were not better that man should be wholly 
influenced by calm reason, speaking in the plainest 



35 

language ? I answer that man is not such a crea- 
ture. He is not so constituted as to be governed 
by reason alone in its purest and most abstract form. 
He is endowed with sentiments, propensities, impulses, 
and passions, which are his sources of action. They 
can never be obliterated from the human constitu- 
tion; — they must, therefore, be guided, governed, and 
used. It is the business of the orator to use them ; 
but consistently with reason, and according to her 
dictates. If he step beyond that hne, he violates his 
sacred trust. Do you say that this power is capable of 
great abuse ? I accept it as proof of a great good. 
Every faculty and acquisition of man is liable to abuse; 
the more so in proportion to its excellence. Why say 
that eloquence won the cause that should have been 
lost, rather than that the want of eloquence lost the 
cause which should have been won ? Are not these 
things all relative 1 Can there be absolute equality of 
human powers ? To use an old illustration, Calvus 
was the orator of Rome until Hortensius came, and 
Hortensius was esteemed eloquence itself until Cicero 
spoke ; — but is it not plain that Cicero was no more 
likely to have won the cause which should not have 
been won against Hortensius, than Hortensius was 
against Calvus, or he against some humbler orator of 
Rome, had no Cicero or Hortensius ever hved 7 Since, 
then, this liability to occasional misuse and accidental 
evil belongs not to the degree of eloquence, but rather 
to the faculty of speech, or reason itself, since it is but 
a part of the necessary imperfection of human affairs, 
our true principle of action should be to raise the com- 
mon standard. Raise it to its utmost height. Let the 
power "be cultivated. Let us have Cicero and Demos- 
thenes among us, if we may. The eloquence of the 
whole country will improve by their example. Give 



36 

us, if it be possible, yet greater than these ; the nation 
will be still advanced by their efforts both morally 
and intellectually. 

Are we not accustomed, in the pride of intellect, 
to despise too much what are sometimes contemp- 
tuously termed the arts of oratory ? What after all 
is it which marks the difference between a dull 
speaker to whom, though intelligent, none listen, and 
an interesting speaker to whom, though not more 
intelligent, all hsten with profit and delight, but style 
of composition ? What between the speaker of com- 
mon interest, and the speaker of thrilling interest, 
but style of delivery added to style of composition ? 
Chesterfield, though somewhat finical in his notions of 
deportment in common fife, was yet an acute observer 
of mankind and an excellent judge of the subject on 
which he writes, when he says without qualification, 
that success as a speaker turns more upon manner 
than matter. " Pitt and Murray," he tells us, meaning 
Lord Chatham and Lord Mansfield, " were beyond 
comparison the best speakers of the House of Com- 
mons, because they were the best orators. They 
alone had the art to quiet or inflame the House. Not 
that their matter was better, or their arguments 
stronger, than those of other speakers. But the House 
expects pleasure from- them and therefore hstens ; 
finds it and therefore approves." 

It is sometimes said, and has been said by profound 
thinkers and able writers too, that the arts of oratory 
do but serve to create distrust. But is it any other 
than bad oratory which produces this effect ? Is it not 
excess ? " Ars est cclare artem ; " — and every man 
of common judgment soon learns how to measure his 
own strength, and dares not reach beyond his ability. 
The error with us is altogether on the other side. 



37 

But, if education were mainly directed to this end, 
would there not be improvement ? Should we have 
so many pious and sensible discourses from the pulpit 
coldly read in such an insensible, unintelligible, and 
absolutely insufferable manner, as we now often do ? 
Should we hear so many learned arguments at the bar 
wanting the first element of logic, a distinct proposition 
in them, from beginning to end, — a series of broken 
sentences begun and never ended, marking each rule 
of grammar only by its violation 1 And who before- 
hand shall presume to set the farthest limit to im- 
provement ? If education were so directed, what 
adequate reason can be assigned why the eloquence of 
this country might not rival that of Greece and Rome 1 
Whence this admitted inferiority of modern eloquence? 
For the moderns are prompt enough to assume to 
themselves all that is their due. Yet, while they claim 
to compete with the ancients successfully in every 
other species of composition, to surpass them in some, 
here the general consent of mankind yields to these 
the palm. 

Hume doubts, not of the fact, but of its causes, 
and upon the whole confesses himself unsatisfied with 
every reason that had been assigned ; nor do I know 
that any writer since his day has given a more satis- 
factory solution of this problem. But, looking at the 
history of Europe since the revival of letters, do we 
not see sufficient cause, unless England during a short 
period of her history be an exception, in arbitrary 
governments 1 No slave, says Longinus, ever was an 
orator. A more modern writer thus amplifies the re- 
mark: " Poetry, and other parts of Hterature which are 
only proper for amusement, may possibly flourish under 
the smiles of an arbitrary prince ; but force and solidity 
of reasoning, or a sublime and commanding eloquence 



38 

are inconsistent with slavish restraint or timorous de- 
pendency." The thought is profound. All history 
corroborates its truth. Great eloquence has coexisted 
only with great popular freedom. The eloquence of 
Greece and Rome expired with the fall of liberty. 
Freedom of speech must of necessity precede elo- 
quence. But beyond that there must be motive ; it 
must have power ; it must see results from its own 
efficacy. And notwithstanding the great and glorious 
hberty of the land of our fathers, it may well be doubt- 
ed whether even there the overpowering influence of 
the crown and the aristocracy, habitually controlling 
popular representation, and binding always a majority 
of the Commons, has not tended, more than has been 
allowed for, to repress the cultivation of oratory, by 
lessening competition in that art, and thus preventing 
its developement to that ampUtude of glory which 
otherwise it might have reached. 

If this cause have operated there, it cannot operate 
here. Executive influence may indeed exercise a 
partial control over some particular body of repre- 
sentatives, shutting their ears, hearts, and understand- 
ings, against the most convincing arguments of hu- 
man reason, and the most affecting appeals of human 
eloquence. But these reach beyond those to whom 
they are primarily addressed. The press gives them, 
if with diminished efficacy, still eflfective, to the peo- 
ple. The great corrective of free popular elections 
instantly succeeds. And if the people have but half 
the virtue, or a tythe of the inteUigence, which we 
are apt to ascribe to them, the thunders of the 
Senate Chamber cannot roll in vain over an agitated 
land. There is nothing surely in the nature of our 
government to restrain the wing of eloquence from 
her widest or her loftiest flight. And such is the 



39 

effect of popular institutions on this species of com- 
position, that notwithstanding defective education, and 
a general neglect of the oratorical art, impartial critics, 
searching for the best specimens of deliberative elo- 
quence which the present day affords, would proba- 
bly make their selection from the debates of our 
national legislature. What is there, since the death 
of Canning, in the parliamentary eloquence of Great 
Britain, which can be fairly said to surpass, if it equal, 
that which we sometimes hear from our own Con- 
gress ? 

Yet it is said that the Anglo-Saxon blood wants the 
mercurial temperament of Rome and Greece, and that 
the people of America, and especially of New England, 
are too phlegmatic and cold to be affected by oratory, 
however excellent. Litde, as it seems to me, do they 
know of the true character of this people, who so think 
and write. Individually they may be marked, like 
their ancestors, by a certain exterior coldness of man- 
ner ; but collecdvely no people are subject to stronger 
or stranger excitements. The admiration of no people 
is more moved at that which is truly and greatly 
admirable. Look, for example, at the effect of theat- 
rical action upon them. What people are colder, you 
will ask, to the actor of mere secondary merit ? — but, 
give them that superior acting which plays with the 
great passions of the human heart, and what people 
are roused to a more extraordinary pitch of enthu- 
siasm ? But why resort to the stage ? Look to the 
thing itself Watch the breathless multitude when, on 
some rare occasion, it hstens to the voice of gen- 
uine and lofty eloquence. See them, hear them, 
when the man of power, having gradually swelled 
with his theme into some grand career of elevated 
sentiment, suddenly bursts forth into those bold 



40 

figures and that vivid language which excited na- 
ture equally prompts and demands, and say whether 
these men are not capable of being agitated by a 
breath. 

Still others insist that the New-Englanders are 
too cautious and acute, and have too much practical 
good sense, to be really moved and acted upon by 
mere eloquence. The same remark has been made of 
the English ; and Hume, in touching on this topic, 
inquires, with characteristic slyness, whether audi- 
ences as they rise in England can be supposed to have 
more good sense than Julius Caesar. It is a pregnant 
question. For Cicero had power in two several in- 
stances to move this great and resolute man from the 
settled purpose of his soul. Hume alludes to one of 
them, and it deserves consideration. The orator ad- 
dressed not a Roman mob, not the conscript fathers, 
but Caesar alone ; the intellectual, accomplished, and 
practical Caesar ; himself an orator, who spoke, says 
Quinctilian, with the same force with which he fought ; 
whom Cicero counts among the greatest of the orators 
of Rome ; and who knew, as well as Cicero himself, all 
those artifices, as they are often termed, by which the 
unwary might be entrapped, and in which some would 
represent the whole art of oratory to consist. Him 
Cicero addressed, in the plenitude of his power and 
the pride of recent victory, supreme dictator, and des- 
pot of the state. Cicero, the adherent and intimate of 
Pompey, with whose overthrow and slaughter Cassar 
was yet flushed, addressed this man, under these cir- 
cumstances, upon that which he had premeditated and 
resolved. Yet Caesar trembled with emotion, and 
Cicero prevailed. And how was this effected 1 Not by 
turgid declamation, which would have been misplaced ; 
— not by startling and terrific appeals, which would 



41 

have passed by him, like the idle wind ; not by at- 
tempts at high- wrought pathos, against which his audi- 
tor was steeled ; — but by a winning appeal to that 
magnanimity and clemency which were his pride ; a 
flattering address to that noble policy of making friends 
of enemies which he had given out and acted upon 
as his policy, and by a chaste, respectful allusion to his 
vanquished enemy and that fallen cause in which 
Cicero and his client equally partook, but which 
CcGsar could no longer fear. Such topics skilfully and 
delicately pressed, in choice and eloquent, but not 
exaggerated language, left the conqueror of the world 
ashamed of the petty revenge which he had meditated, 
elated with the consciousness of his own superior gen- 
erosity of soul, and confirmed in the larger expediency 
of his own merciful policy. 

But why, asks the modern reader of this beautiful 
composition, did Caesar tremble? since we see neither 
an adequate cause for great emotion, nor any ap- 
parent attempt to excite it. It was by reason of 
that which writing cannot convey, the inexpressi- 
ble magic of tone and look ; for the orator could 
not have alluded to his slaughtered friend and that 
fallen cause, even in the calm and temperate lan- 
guage which he studied to assume, but in a subdued 
and broken voice, and with that tearful aspect, which 
betrayed the deep and real emotion he seemed labor- 
ing to conceal. He was himself moved, and that 
moved Caesar. And are not these sensible moderns, 
even of New England, hable to be swayed by such 
influences ? 

The effects of Christianity, softening and refining 
the passions of the human heart, making us more tem- 
perate beings and less subject to wild emotions, have 
been thought by some unfavorable to great eloquence. 
6 



42 

And it is true that the modern orator dares not appeal 
to the savage principle of revenge ; nor is he justified 
in excitino; hatred of individuals. But what limit has 
he in stirring up hatred of vice, indignation against 
injustice, oppression, fraud, corruption? May he not 
lawfully appeal to every sentiment of patriotism, mag- 
nanimity, and elevation of purpose ? May he not press 
those magic springs w-hich move the softer alEFections 
of the human heart ? And were you to strike out 
from the works of the ancient orators all that is in- 
fected by the barbarism of their age, although this 
would materially mar performances adapted to that 
age, would not enough remain to demonstrate that no 
part of this was essential to their eloquence ? 

As well might it be said that the spirit of Christian- 
ity has impaired the beauty and depressed the sublim- 
ity of poetic composition. Yet does not Milton soar 
upon as bold a wing, and Shakspeare touch a chord of 
as genuine pathos, as any poet of antiquity ? So far is 
the influence of Christianity from having been adverse 
to eloquence, that it claims for its off'spring many of 
the most eloquent effusions of the modern world. It 
opens a whole field of oratory new and peculiar to 
itself. The religion at least of the moderns may boast 
of a power in eloquence, neither heard nor imagined in 
the silent temples of antiquity. The pursuits of clerical 
men being wholly literary, the most eminent among 
them have attained to great nicety in that written 
eloquence which they have been led to cultivate. 
But what improvement should we not witness, if 
to the charm of the composition were oftener add- 
ed the manner of the orator chastened to his cause ? 
And still greater improvement would result, I am 
firmly persuaded, if, not lessening, but doubhng or 
quadrupling, the great labor now bestowed on written 



43 

discourses, those, and they are not few, who have the 
gift, should acquire the art also, of extemporaneous 
composition and delivery. What noble opportuni- 
ties have they of moving the affections, as well as 
leading the judgment, in the cause of infinite truth ! 
For religion is of the heart surely, not of the mere 
reason. It is a feeling, not an abstraction ; an innate 
propensity, sentiment, affection of the human soul ; 
capable of being deeply stirred and warmed and dila- 
ted by the voice of eloquence. The pure intellect, the 
philosophy of religion, let it lucubrate in the closet, or 
meditate in the expanse of nature. Through the pen let 
us learn from its lucubrations, what learning and logic 
can teach (alas ! what can they teach ?) of the mys- 
terious and metaphysical nature of God and of man. 
But from the living pulpit let us learn how to act and 
feel, rather than what to think of things unfathomable. 
Let us not hear of those scholastic theories and con- 
troversial dogmas which have ever distracted and dis- 
graced the Christian church, at times deluging the 
world with blood and crime, and still engendering in 
Chrisdan hearts "envy, hatred, malice, and all unchari- 
tableness." Thence the cold skepticism of Hume. 
Thence the treacherous sneer of Gibbon. Thence 
mainly that open infidelity which now boldly lifts its 
blaspheming voice in the very heart of our own New 
England. 

But we are constantly told that in these days there 
is no room for eloquence ; that it can never again be 
the same divine thing it was of old ; that the advanced 
knowledge and civilization of the world, the improved 
sobriety of modern manners, the greater complexity 
and accuracy of the laws, and the nicer quality of 
modern legislative and judicial institutions, place men 
above those influences which affected either an Athe- 



44 

nian mob or a Roman Senate ; and that the studied 
eloquence of antiquity, speaking in language wrought 
with consummate art and pohshed ad unguem, yet 
exalted, and sometimes passionate, would be whol- 
ly unsuited to the practical affairs of modern life, 
and quite incapable of moving an American audience. 
May not such remarks proceed partly from a misap- 
prehension of the true character of ancient eloquence, 
and partly from an overweening conceit of our own 
intellectual superiority ? Can such causes be justly 
said to be hostile to the cultivation and attainment of 
a degree of eloquence equal to that of antiquity, or do 
they only somewhat modify the quality and form of 
its address ? 

The influence of the press, paradoxical as it may at 
first seem, will be thought perhaps, on reflecdon, more 
adverse than that of any other modern institution to 
the cultivation of oratorical, as distinguished from writ- 
ten, eloquence ; because speeches designed for ex- 
tensive effect are read by more persons than hear 
them ; and the after report is a truly republican 
equalizer among men. The composition of the master 
is not only robbed of half its charm by the loss of voice 
and action, but the very thoughts are frozen and en- 
feebled as the pen gives to the cold sheet what the 
tongue, in the excitement of the hour, had vividly 
impressed on living souls ; while the composition of 
the most ordinary and intolerable speaker may acquire 
in the elaboration of the closet an order, precision, 
accuracy, beauty, force, which his tongue never told, 
nor the heart of his auditor ever conceived to be his. 
This takes something from the ultimate, nothing from 
the immediate effect of oratory, and in most cases 
those to whom it is addressed act under the immediate 
impression. That there is a press everywhere speak- 



45 

ing " with most miraculous organ " may be a reason, 
therefore, why oratory should be cultivated by fewer 
persons ; but it is no adequate cause Avhy the great 
numbers who do practise speaking as a business 
should not cultivate its power, nor why, if cultivated, 
it should not produce at the time its ancient and 
legitimate effects. 

There may be something, too, in the other causes 
which are suggested as operating unfavorably on the 
oratorical art, especially in their bearing on forensic 
eloquence ; — yet even here the probable effects 
from such causes seem to be commonly much over- 
rated. The accuracy of modern legal proceedings, 
the simplicity and narrowness of the questions pre- 
sented for consideration by what is termed the issue 
between the pardes, the extreme technicality of the 
law as a science, and the vast accumulation of stat- 
utes and reports, making it the labor of years to 
become but moderately learned in the law, added 
to the hurry of trials and the want of opportunity for 
great premeditation, are circumstances which doubtless 
have their weight, and which are thought by some 
necessarily to preclude the attainment, or forbid the 
exercise at a modern bar, of the highest kind of ora- 
torical talents. Must we admit then that even Cicero 
and Demosthenes, placed in a Massachusetts court- 
room, instructed for their case in the necessary knowl- 
edge of the law and of our language and of the man- 
ners and sentiments of the age, would fail to produce 
any extraordinary effect, and speedily sink to the level 
of the respectable advocates who abound there? I 
must confess that I cannot bring myself to this opin- 
ion. It is true that the judicial courts, both of Athens 
and of Rome, were composed of a numerous body 
taken from the people at large. They judged equally 



46 

of the law and the fact ; and an appeal lay in most 
cases, if not in all, to the collective body of the people. 
Hence, doubtless, loose considerations of natural equity 
were as likely to govern their judgments as the letter 
of the law. The better feelings and the fiercer pas- 
sions of our nature were in a great degree open to 
address ; and the pleader of causes, it would seem, 
might freely range over every topic likely to influence 
the decision of a popular assembly. Contrasted with 
this, they who apologize for the inferiority of modern 
eloquence call upon us to look at the venerable con- 
stitution of a modern court. There sit a grave and 
learned few, selected, from a class dedicated to the 
law, for their superior wisdom, erudition, and virtue. 
Their hves are spent in profound investigation, accu- 
rate analysis, and logical deduction. Their office is 
simply to pronounce the law upon the precise ques- 
tion before them, and they sit in judgment, bound by 
their oaths and their characters, to the strict discharge 
of this duty, under the critical, and perhaps captious 
scrutiny of a learned bar. What have such men to do 
with motives of generosity and expediency ? What 
ability have they, if they had the will, to exercise a 
large discretion, or to obey the impulse of feeling ? 
Would Cicero or Demosthenes, it may be asked, in 
the argument of a technical demurrer before such a 
tribunal, have ventured into the regions of poetical 
oratory ? Surely not, for the first rule of eloquence is 
propriety ; and the first requisite of an orator, good 
sense. ^^Scribendi" (and but for prosody loquendi) 
" recti sapere est et principium et fonsJ'^ 

But it is by no means uncommon for cases to 
arise in the course of modern judicial proceedings, 
presenting to the Court for legal adjudication ques- 
tions of national rights, state policy, the powers of 



47 

government, and of particular departments of the 
government, subjects of international and constitu- 
tional law, far more frequent in this country than 
in any other, which often not only fairly open, but 
imperatively demand, the discussion of the broadest 
principles of general justice and expediency, and in 
which it is difficult to say what hmit is fixed by the 
nature, either of the question or of the tribunal, to 
the widest range of genuine argumentative eloquence. 
The Cherokee cause, for example, was of this descrip- 
tion. Nullification, had it hved long enough, might 
have presented such another to the judicial tribunals, 
before which it must, from its nature, have been dis- 
cussed with the same ampHtude of eloquence as it was 
in the Senate Chamber. Every lawyer in the course 
of his practice has heard argued at the bar, even under 
the form of some precise and narrow issue in law, 
topics similar to these, if not equal in the extent and 
magnitude of the inquiries involved. The character of 
the tribunal addressed, granting it to exceed immeas- 
urably that even of the Athenian Areopagus in learn- 
ing and dignity, can set no other limit to the range of 
eloquence than that which justly belongs to the pro- 
priety of the cause. And when we turn from the 
Bench to those extraordinary and deeply interesting 
questions of fact, which often present themselves in 
important causes for the consideration of a jury, and 
reflect that a jury is, after all, nothing more than a 
small popular assembly, not differing widely either in 
its constitution or power, at least over criminal causes, 
from the judices of antiquity, and call to mind how 
often their interests, prejudices, passions, and feelings 
are in fact appealed to, with more or less of art and 
effect, it seems impossible to escape the conclusion, 
that modern forensic oratory has after all a wide scope 



48 

for eloquence, and that modern inferiority in that re- 
spect, if it exist, must be mainly attributable to other 
causes. 

The eloquence designed to produce great impres- 
sion upon a modern assembly of any kind, at least in 
New England, must undoubtedly be of somewhat 
sterner stuff, than that which might have been suf- 
ficient to move the flighty inhabitants of Italy or the 
fickle multitude of Athens. But, after all, the distinc- 
tion seems to lie rather in the greater difficulty of 
satisfying the reason, than the greater difficulty of 
moving the affections, of a modern auditory. The 
reason must first be satisfied. This was the precept 
and the practice of antiquity ; but with us the reason is 
a faculty more cultivated, more critical, more captious 
than it was in Athens or in Rome. Greater refine- 
ment of argument is required, therefore, to reach this 
point ; but, that being done, the heart is as Hable to be 
moved now, as it was two thousand years ago, by those 
powers and sympathies which God has created pur- 
posely to move it. Greater art, greater skill, not more 
native power, is requisite to produce the same effects. 
A modern audience demands better eloquence. Is 
that a reason why that which they have should be 
really inferior 1 or why eloquence as an art should 
be less cultivated than it was 1 

In estimating the inaptitude of the ancient oratorical 
style for modern forensic purposes, is not the case 
commonly overstated, by tacitly comparing in our 
minds occasions absolutely dissimilar, and then inquir- 
ing whether the eloquence which was admirably 
adapted for the one would be at all suited for the 
other ? Do we not turn our thoughts on the one 
hand to common business of daily occurrence in our 
courts, and on the other to orations defivered in 



49 

causes of a peculiar and public character ? Ancient 
arguments in private causes, of small moment except 
to the parties, are either not preserved, or Httle read, 
and not at all referred to in our general esdmate of 
ancient oratory. We are apt to look upon the extant 
orations of Cicero, for example, as if they had consti- 
tuted the great bulk of his oratorical composition, 
or were at least fair specimens of his usual style of 
forensic argument, without reflecting that these were 
the remarkable few which he judged worthy of pub- 
lication, because of their extraordinary character, the 
general interest of the causes to which they re- 
late, the unusual field which they afforded for the 
higher kind of eloquence, or other reasons which had 
given them peculiar celebrity. But looking upon 
them in this latter light, is it fair to ask, whether a 
style so elevated and oratorical would be suitable for 
the common pracdce of a modern bar ? The whole 
number of these orations but little exceeds fifty, and 
far the greater part were speeches to the Senate, or 
harangues to the people, or other addresses not of a 
forensic character. Yet for thirty-five years Cicero was 
in almost uninterrupted pracdce at the bar, arguing 
causes daily. " There scarcely passes a day," says he 
in one of his private letters, " in which I do not defend 
some ; " — and there is notice of his being engaged in 
more than one trial on the same day. It is quite cer- 
tain, therefore, that his forensic arguments must have 
been many hundreds, probably some thousands, in 
number. Yet of these we have scarce twenty ; — 
and in what kind of causes 1 Proceedings of the 
nature of a modern impeachment were of great fre- 
quency both at Athens and at Rome ; causes for the 
most part capital, and in which the whole life and 
administration of some servant of the republic were 
7 



50 

judicially arraigned. The most of these forensic ora- 
tions of Cicero will be found to have been spoken in 
cases of this description ; and of the residue nearly 
all were in causes, which, for various reasons, assumed 
a political complexion. Instead of comparing these 
compositions, therefore, with such arguments as seem 
to us most suitable for matters of daily occurrence, 
we should rather compare them with the orations, 
as they may well be termed, of Sheridan and Burke 
on the trial of Warren Hastings ; and we shall soon 
begin to suspect that there is less difference than we 
were wont to imagine in the latitude of ancient and 
modern oratory. 

Two or three only of the orations of Cicero are 
preserved, which belong strictly to the class of private 
and civil suits ; and these I imagine will be found in 
hke manner upon careful examinadon to depart less 
widely, than we might at first expect, from the style 
of argument appropriate to similar causes before a 
modern jury ; — except indeed the oration for Archias 
the poet, so commonly, and so unfairly, selected as a 
signal proof of the unfitness of ancient eloquence for 
the real business of hfe. This was a pecuHar and 
distinguished composition, which probably as soon 
as it was pronounced became the subject of general 
remark and of eager curiosity among the literati of 
Rome, and which Cicero, therefore, gave again to the 
public in its present form. It is true that the whole 
question was whether Archias was a Roman citizen ; 
and that after saying in few words all that was proper 
to be said upon a very simple state of law and facts, 
the orator, having a poet for his client, takes advantage 
of that circumstance to launch forth into a splendid 
panegyric upon poetry and liberal pursuits. This 
occupies the greater part of his discourse, and yet is 



61 

no otherwise connected with the cause than by the 
far-fetched and flimsy argument, that all who were 
eminent in such glorious arts, ought, therefore, to be 
taken for citizens of Rome. A strange course indeed 
for learned counsel in modern times upon a question of 
naturalization ! But when cited as a specimen of the 
ancient mode of arguing a plain matter of fact, why 
is it not noted, as in common justice to antiquity it 
should be, that the eloquent advocate both introduces 
and closes this beautiful piece of mere oratory with 
the most formal apologies for departing from his usual 
forensic style. So far from even tacitly permitting this 
to pass for a fair example of ancient argumentative 
eloquence, the author himself expressly declares it to 
be endrely inconsistent with the practice of the bar, 
and, instead of claiming to be so heard as matter of 
common right or of established usage, he diffidently 
introduces these remarks to the mere favor and 
indulgence of the judges; while the judges, or jurors, 
as we should rather say from the nature of their 
office, being, as it happened, men of letters and not 
men of law, could sit contentedly and hear Cicero ex- 
patiate for some ten or fifteen minutes on such a theme, 
notwithstanding a fair warning in limme, that what he 
proposed to say had nothing to do with the cause. 
The truth is, that Cicero seems to have been placed in 
a posture which sometimes occurs to the modern ad- 
vocate. His client expected a speech, but his cause 
gave him nothing to say ; and, what was of more im- 
portance, and far rarer in modern practice, the judges 
concurred with the client. Perhaps modern judges, 
however, might be less inexorable if they should hear 
such eloquence. 

The trial of Milo, likewise often referred to in vari- 
ous regards, was, in truth, a political cause vehemently 



52 

agitating the great parties of Rome, though the charge, 
reduced to modern form, was nothing more than an 
indictment for murder. The answer was such as often 
arises, namely, that the deceased was the aggressor, 
and the killing a necessary act of self-defence. Hence, 
notwithstanding the political complexion of the cause, 
and the peculiar circumstances of this trial, conducted 
before a tribunal created by a special act of legislation, 
and under the eye of Pompey himself who attended in 
person surrounded by his troops, it is, nevertheless, 
from its intrinsic character, a fairer subject of compari- 
son with modern causes, than most of those in which 
an argument has been preserved. Can any lawyer 
read this admirable performance and deny that much 
of it would answer for a modern jury? might we not 
say all of it, except so far as a degree of unsuitableness 
results, not from the style of composition, or the mag- 
nificence of the oratory, but from the manners and 
morals of the age, and the peculiar circumstances which 
have been alluded to as belonging to this trial 1 The 
whole argument, for example, tending to estabUsh the 
fact, that the rencounter was accidental on the part of 
Milo, but designed on the part of Clodius, and that the 
latter, though slain, was yet the real assassin, is such 
close and logical argument upon circumstantial evi- 
dence, drawn chiefly from the conduct of the respec- 
tive parties, as could not fail to recommend itself most 
powerfully to modern jurors and judges ; nor is there 
any thing in what may be termed the eloquence of the 
argument, which can be fairly said to be unsuitable for 
a great capital cause, especially for one with which 
political considerations necessarily, though perhaps 
improperly, mingled. 

When, on the other hand, the orator descants 
largely and forcibly on the flagitious character of 



53 

Clodius, contrasting it with that of his client, not 
for the purpose merely of sustaining the probability 
of his main position, that the former was the ag- 
gressor, but with the farther view of showing that 
Milo, had he so intended, would have been justifi- 
ed in killing Clodius as a common enemy of the re- 
public, he uses an argument, which was doubtless 
forcible to a Roman, but which would be shocking 
to a modern jury, even if it were admissible in our 
course of judicial practice. Yet the argument was 
a fair one as it was used, being designed to turn the 
edge of a dangerous suggestion from the prosecuting 
party, that the tenor of the special decree, under 
which this trial was had, not only had prejudged 
the cause and, in effect, had declared the killing of 
Clodius to have been unjustifiable, but even went so 
much farther as to make this particular homicide a 
treason against the state, and thus left nothing for the 
judges to inquire of but the bare fact of the kilhng 
and by whom, which Milo had not from the beginning 
denied. I am inclined to think, therefore, that the 
argument for Milo, and others of the same class, 
would be ill adapted for a modern forum, not so 
much from the style of composition, as because the 
sentiments, laws, and manners of that age and people 
sometimes Jed to a different range of argument and of 
illustration from that which would now be effective or 
proper. 

The same remarks, I imagine, might be apphed to 
the orations of Demosthenes. Nearly all of these are 
popular harangues on political topics. The oration on 
the Crown was indeed forensic in form, but in a cause 
tried by the whole people, and one which, in its nature, 
was analogous only to a modern impeachment, fairly 
and necessarily involving the whole pohtical history of 



64 

Athens under the administration of the orator himself. 
But if we look at the orations of Isseus, the preceptor 
of Demosthenes, translated by Sir William Jones with 
legal exactness doubdess as well as hterary grace, we 
shall find these, which related to private causes of 
inheritance, as simple and logical in their structure as 
modern arguments, although the reasoning may be less 
minute and refined. And, in general, it seems to me, 
though I speak with great diflidence on such a sub- 
ject, that we shall more often find, in the ancient 
orators, arguments adduced, which in their substantial 
character would be unsuitable for a modern audience, 
than a style of composition too elevated and too orator- 
ical for the occasion, according to our standard of taste. 
Not that these ancient works, designed for a differ- 
ent age, are to be exactly followed as precise models 
of style for modern imitadon. But the point which 
I mean to enforce is, that, as at one time these ven- 
erable antiques were erroneously and indiscriminately 
set up for literal models, so now, in the altered fashion 
of the times, the unsuitableness of their oratorical style 
for modern eloquence, even of the forensic cast, is 
altogether overrated; — and that modern forensic elo- 
quence is really capable of great and substantial im- 
provement by the study of these mighty masters of 
their art. If such an opinion seem to require the 
sancdon of a name, we may cite for its support 
a legal authority no less than Lord Mansfield, with 
whom it was not mere speculadve opinion, but matter 
of practice. 

Yet we hear ancient eloquence somedmes spoken 
of, as if it were a species of rhapsody instead of argu- 
ment, composed of apostrophes to the Alban hills and 
groves, and appeals to the shades of those generous 
souls who died at Marathon. Surely this is wide from 



56 

the fact ; for the " Dii immortales" of Cicero will be 
found to occur little oftener alter all, than the " Good 
God, Mr. Speaker," of modern oratory ; and the lan- 
guage of Demosthenes certainly, if not of Cicero, is far 
less ornate and violently figurative, than that of the 
modern compositions with which it may be most aptly 
compared. It is not that the modern orator dares not 
and does not, on occasions of great excitement, use as 
bold an oratorical license as Greece or Rome ever wit- 
nessed ; but that his bold figures and lofty flights are 
commonly in worse taste and more feebly sustained. 
He has not prepared his audience with so much art by 
the general strain of his eloquence, and by a gradual 
elevation of their feelings to a point which wakes and 
fires the imagination. Nor does he give full effect to 
his oratory by that admirable action, not gesticuladon, 
but tone, look, manner of delivery, which is wholly 
neglected by the moderns, but which the ancients 
esteemed and cultivated as if it were the very soul of 
eloquence. Where that does exist in any considera- 
ble excellence, accompanied by real power of vigorous 
composition, moderns are as ready to go along with it 
as the ancients were. What, for example, is bolder 
in all antiquity than Chatham's celebrated speech on 
the means employed by the ministry to suppress what 
they termed an unnatural rebellion ? When he invok- 
ed the genius of the British Constitution, and personi- 
fied and animated the very portraits of illustrious 
patriots which surrounded him, he trod upon that 
dizzy verge which distinguishes the sublime from the 
ridiculous. But he trod it like a god. The Peers 
were electrified. They breathed under the momentary 
spell of the eloquence of Cicero or Demosthenes ; — 
and instead of being revolted at this imaginary insult 
to modern reason and good sense, they rather looked 



56 

to see the Genius of England rising in the midst of 
them, and turned with expectation to their invoked 
ancestry starting fi'om the walls. Chatham was a true 
orator; the greatest, probably, of the modern world; — 
for what must we think of that almost super-human 
power before which Mansfield, the gifted and accom- 
plished Mansfield, second in oratory only to him, was 
literally impotent and awe-struck ? 

The comparative degree of opportunity for prepara- 
tion also seems to me greatly overstated in estimating 
the qualities of the ancient and the modern orator. 
We are apt, without reflection, to imagine that the 
compositions which we read, and which are so care- 
fully elaborated, were wholly written out before de- 
Uvery, as a clergyman writes his sermon, and that they 
were only spoken mcmoriter instead of being read, 
— said, instead of being sung. But the multiplicity of 
business in which Cicero was engaged, and the nature 
of that business, would have rendered this as impossi- 
ble, if desirable, for him, as it would be in modern dmes. 
For, in the trials which he attended daily, witnesses 
were often to be examined vivd voce, as in ours ; their 
testimony was to be the foundadon of his argument; 
and the arguments of opposite counsel were to be no- 
ticed and rephed to then as now. Of the Consular 
Oradons we know historically, that most were compos- 
ed on brief preparadon, and some without opportunity 
of a moment's forecast. Take those against Catihne, for 
example. The first was provoked by the unexpected 
entrance of the conspirator into the Senate Chamber, 
and spoken upon the spot. The second was delivered 
to the people on the following morning. The occasion 
of the third was a decree of the Senate following upon 
the reading of certain intercepted letters, to explain 
which decree Cicero went immediately from the 



57 

Senate-House to the Rostra and harangued the people. 
The fourth was in the Senate, on the following morn- 
ing, at the close of a debate, on the question of death 
or banishment for the conspirators. So the Philippics 
against Antony were all, or nearly all, the offspring of 
sudden occasions. The compositions, therefore, which 
we read are only the author's careful reports of his 
own speeches, subsequently prepared for publication, 
much as is practised in modern times. 

Of Demosthenes it is recorded, that some of his 
best efforts were wholly unpremeditated. Parts of the 
celebrated oration on the Crown were evidently so, 
being not only direct reply, but citing even the very 
w^ords of his adversary who had just spoken. And 
why doubt what Demosthenes himself is reported to 
have said in relation to speeches which he had oppor- 
tunity to prepare 1 that he neither wrote the whole, nor 
spoke without having committed parts to writing. A 
practice which has undoubtedly been followed by some 
of the most disdnguished modern orators on important 
occasions ; and which, if more generally pursued, would 
probably contribute much to elevate the character of 
modern eloquence. " Stylus optimus et prcBsfantissimus 
dicendi effector ac magister" This vv^as the opinion of 
Cicero. And the present Lord Chancellor of England 
has said, " I should lay it down as a rule which admits 
of no exception, that a man will speak well in propor- 
tion as he has written much." Yet who pracdses such 
discipline with us ? 

What then was it, beyond native power, which gave to 
these ancients their extraordinary eloquence, agreed to 
have been superior to that of the whole modern world ? 
For we cannot admit that the capacity of man for this 
species of composition has deteriorated ; nor that 
modern audiences are incapable of appreciating true 
8 



58 

eloquence when they find it ; nor that suitable themes 
and occasions and opportunities for it do not arise in 
the course of modern affairs. Must not the whole 
answer be, if the effect of civil government be set 
aside, difference of education and greater cultivation of 
the oratorical art ? And this answer stands recorded 
in their works. What their scheme of education was, is 
no secret. We know, because they have told us, that 
their education was directed to this end from infancy. 
Their minds were indeed nobly stored with the treas- 
ures of science, philosophy, and history, as well as 
poetry and belles-lettres, belonging to their age ; but 
the attention was mainly devoted to language, its power, 
its use. In their eariiest years they were taught to 
read, not merely by the eye, but for the ear. Before 
they were of age to compose, they learnt to speak. 
They cultivated, the memory of language to the utmost. 
They studied the power of the human voice and all the 
minutiae of effective delivery. Advancing in age, they 
composed, not rarely, but daily. Next they declaimed 
their own compositions ; and this too was a daily exer- 
cise, not shghtingly performed, but subjected to rigor- 
ous criticism both as to style of composition and style 
of deUvery. Finally they composed and declaimed 
extemporaneously as a constant exercise in the same 
critical manner. Thesfe studies they never abandoned. 
Cicero, late in life, tells us that it was, and always had 
been, his rule, never to let a day pass without writing. 
After he was largely engaged in business, we find 
him still declaiming daily. And to such degree of 
accuracy and minuteness did he think it worth while 
to have studied the Greek writers and acquired their 
language, that, for the sake of better criticism from his 
Athenian masters, he used to declaim extemporane- 
ously in Greek. Probably the ancient orators, when 



^9 

preparing for important causes, selected for subjects of 
composition and declamation such topics as were likely 
to arise there for actual discussion. Consequently these 
men brought to the real contest not only habits of ac- 
curate and choice composition, but a store of rich ma- 
terials collected for present use ; minds, not only full- 
fraught with various learning, but pregnant also with 
striking thoughts and expressions appropriate to the 
cause, and which, from their familiarity, would naturally 
present themselves in extemporaneous composition, 
flowino; into use as occasion should make them suita- 
ble and effective. In short they made eloquence their 
study as no moderns do, and were prepared for it by 
their wdiole course of education as no moderns are. 
With this fact staring us in the face, is it not idle, is it 
not unphilosophical, to search for remote causes of in- 
feriority in modern eloquence ? Here is one plain, 
adequate, unquestionable, known cause. Why should 
not the same means applied to the human mind now 
produce, under a free popular government, equal 
effects ? Who can doubt that great cultivation of the 
natural talent and genius of the people would lead to 
great results ? Who shall measure those results 1 
Who can doubt at least that vast improvement would 
be effected 1 

Does not the whole question then come to this, 
whether in the present state of the world there is 
sufficient motive for such cultivation of this art ? Its 
immense importance in a public view has been already 
glanced at. But is there sufficient motive to the indi- 
vidual 1 And when we look at the greatness of the 
rewards of eloquence in antiquity, when we see Cicero 
loaded with offices and honors, swaying, while the con- 
stitution and the laws prevailed, the whole destiny of 
that imperial republic, the mistress of the world ; when 



eo 

we contemplate his ample fortune, his Roman palace, his 
eighteen princely villas, his magnificent libraries, his 
costly works of art, and reflect that these were all the 
lawful fruits of his eloquence and the voluntary offer- 
ings of those whom its patronage had served, we are 
indeed lost in amazement at the splendor and magni- 
tude of ancient munificence, and sensibly struck with 
the comparative meanness and poverty of all modern 
excitements. But reverse this picture. Behold Cicero 
banished, his estates confiscated, his houses demolish- 
ed, his wealth plundered, himself finally murdered by 
the enemies whom that eloquence had roused, and we 
shall see the magnitude of the rewards counterpoised 
by the magnitude of the dangers. All things in fife 
must be measured by some relative standard. Look- 
ing upon the scale of the ancient world, we see the 
same magnificence of wealth showered upon eminent 
soldiers, illustrious statesmen, distinguished artists, 
actors even, the elite of all conditions. The plunder 
of Asiatic provinces and the spoils of captive princes 
loaded the car of the conqueror, and were heaped upon 
all the favorites of the people. The riches of the 
earth were Rome's ; but her laws and customs accu- 
mulated them in the hands of a patrician few, while 
the great body of her people were miserably poor and 
oppressed. Under modern, and especially American 
institudons, we are blessed with more of equality and 
a juster graduation of all things ; there is neither such 
abject excess of poverty on the one hand, nor the 
same overgrown superfluity of wealth on the other. 
And looking with an eye accustomed to the modern 
scale, comparing the rewards of distinguished orators 
with those of other men, in respect of consideration, 
wealth, influence, and political power combined, and 
considering the inestimable addition of value which 



61 

increased security of property, life, and liberty confers 
on all earthly possessions, who shall say that eloquence 
is not now as highly estimated as it was of old, and 
that its whole relative recompense is not still a suffi- 
cient excitement to honorable ambition ? 

In the ancient repubhcs eloquence and arms were 
the only honorable avenues to political power. Are 
they not still the favorites of the people? Wealth, the 
general pursuit, was yet a constant object of jealousy 
and suspicion. The people were always prompt to 
see the dangers of their own pollution from that source. 
He is rich ! He is rich ! Hunc tic, Romane, caveto ! 
Beware of corruption ! Your liberties are bought and 
sold ! Such was the cry of demagogues, in Rome, 
against that monster — wealth. But the flourish of 
popular oratory, and the glitter of arms, a few bursts 
of eloquent patriotism, or some slight, yet enduring, 
memorial of personal exposure in the public cause, 
these, in the Grecian and Roman republics, were 
titles of irresistible merit to every office and honor 
which the people could bestow. — And mark well 
the difference, for it is greatly remarkable, that how- 
ever petty orators in ordinary times may have fo- 
mented the spirit of faction, stirring up tumult and 
disaff'ection by arraying the poor against the rich, 
yet, in the crisis of real difficulty and danger, the 
mighty masters of eloquence uniformly stood forth 
champions of liberty, bold vindicators, stern upholders 
of the constitution and laws of their country ; while 
these, invariably, after being often endangered, were 
ultimately subverted and swept away through the blind 
devotion of the populace to some military chieftain. 
How much of political wisdom has man gained by the 
experience of twenty centuries ? Much in this ; — 
that, although his eye is still dazzled by the brilliance 



62 

of arms, and his heart easily seduced by the fascina- 
tions of military glory, yet his more sober judgment 
does, upon the whole, estimate this species of renown 
more justly than it did amidst the spoils, ovations, and 
triumphs of more classical but barbarous ages. The 
passion for war has sensibly dechned. It is yet de- 
clining. With it must necessarily decline all undue 
influences of mere mihtary fame. But the power of 
genuine manly eloquence, founded as it is on ultimate 
principles in the constitution of man, friendly to the 
preservation of his political rights, consonant with the 
moral beauty and dignity of his nature, must for ever 
maintain its ascendency over the hearts of the people. 
Let him, then, who is ambitious, honorably ambitious, of 
popularity and political power, in the modern republic, 
give his days and his nights, his youth and his riper 
years, as those ancients did, to the study and perfec- 
tion of this greatest of human arts. 

It has not been my purpose to go into a considera- 
tion of the general scheme of education which would 
best conduce to this end. My whole object is to im- 
press upon all who hear me, so far as my feeble ability 
may permit, the vast practical importance of bringing 
up our classical learning, here in New England, to the 
mark of true scholarship ; and especially for its effect 
upon the writing and speaking of the country. For 
I hold it to be the dictate of reason, confirmed by 
all experience, that the early education best adapt- 
ed to produce accomplished writers and accomphsh- 
ed speakers, is that, which, while it sharpens and 
invigorates the faculties, while it settles habits of at- 
tention and investigation, gives the most accurate 
knowledge of the construction, power, and harmony 
of language, with the greatest command of it in choice 
and arrangement of words, fills the memory most 



68 

copiously with noble sentiments, agreeable images, 
and stiiking turns of expression, and most kindles 
in the youthful soul that enthusiasm for hberal pur- 
suits, and generous ardor in the cause of regulated lib- 
erty, which so distinguished those admirable ancients. 
What has yet been discovered or invented by man, 
which so well answers all these ends at once, as accu- 
rate study of the ancient languages, and familiar ac- 
quaintance with their glorious hterature? Is this all 
theory? Do you want practical proofs? Shall I point 
to examples then ? 

"Hence to tlie famous orators repair, 
Those ancient, whose resistless eloquence 
Wielded at will the fierce democratic," 

and those modern, too, whose names are names 
of eloquence itself. Time w^ould fail me, were I 
barely to run through the illustrious catalogue, and 
point out the distinguishing fact in the hfe and edu- 
cation of each, which bears upon the illustration of 
this truth. Look for yourselves at those departed 
orators of England, who stood preeminent, longo 
intervallo, in the ranks of eloquence, parliamentary 
or forensic, and you will find not one out of the 
host, w^ho was not deeply imbued with classical htera- 
ture ; scarce one who was not so accurately instruct- 
ed in the ancient languages, as to be a scholar among 
scholars ; not one, who did not extensively study 
language and eloquence. I select Charles Fox and 
William Pitt, because, while they illustrate equally 
with others the main point of these remarks, they are 
at the same time peculiar and striking examples of the 
effect of a general system of education directed to the 
purpose of creating orators and statesmen. For, in 
the persons of Lord Holland and Lord Chatham, the 
world beheld the singular spectacle of two rival political 
leaders educating their children expressly to be, what 



64 

both became, the first parliamentary orators of their 
age, and premiers of England. And, to accomplish 
this purpose, both these distinguished parents, them- 
selves practical orators, Lord Chatham certainly one 
of the greatest that ever Uved, concurrently judged, 
that the strength of youth should be expended in 
acquiring accurate knowledge of the ancient languages 
and extensive learning in Greek and Roman hterature. 
Fox was one of the best Grecians in England; accu- 
rate enough, after he had reached the full height of his 
parliamentary fame, at an age when most men have 
forgotten this half-learned knowledge of their youth, 
to cope with Wakefield, that famous and professed 
philologist, in criticism on the merest niceties of Greek 
prosody and dialect. From the correspondence be- 
tween them it appears, that Fox was amusing his 
leisure in the country with reading the Greek trage- 
dians without commentary or translation, while he was 
constantly citing memoriter, because he had not his 
Homer by him, verses from all parts of the Iliad and 
Odyssey to illustrate his critical remarks. The learn- 
ed tutor of Pitt has recorded, that, when his pupil 
first came to him at the age of fourteen, his proficiency 
in the learned languages was probably greater than 
ever had been acquired by any other person in such 
early youth. " In Latin ' authors he seldom met with 
any difficulty ; and it w^as no uncommon thing for him 
to read into EngUsh six or seven pages of Thucydides 
which he had not previously seen, without more than 
two or three mistakes, and sometimes without one. 
And after that" says Dr. Prettyman, "he became 
deeply versed in the niceties of construction and pecuh- 
arities of idiom, both in the Latin and Greek languages." 
He adds, "There was scarcely a Latin or a Greek clas- 
sic of any eminence, the whole of whose works Mr. 
Pitt and I did not read together." 



65 

Look at those who have been most distinguish- 
ed among the orators of our own country, and you 
will be struck with the same fact ; not to the same 
extent, indeed, (though James Otis was so exact 
a scholar as to have written treatises on Greek and 
Latin prosody,) still, in general not to the same 
extent, because our means of early education have 
been inferior ; but you will find all who have at- 
tained great eminence, with the single exception of 
that phenomenon of orators, Patrick Henry, good 
classical scholars for their age and country. I grieve 
at the distinction ; but it has existed and exists. 
You will find all of them, at some period, students in 
tucse niceties of language ; some, late in life, laboring 
in classical literature to repair the imperfect education 
of their youth. And since Patrick Henry stands a 
sohtary exception to the whole current of example, 
one singular fact should be noted, which is among the 
best authenticated of the imperfect traditions of his 
early history. It is this ; — when at last he began to 
read, somewhat late for the commencement of an edu- 
cation, and then reading in the spirit of idleness and for 
mere amusement as it seemed, one of the books which 
happened to fall into his hands, and upon which he 
immediately fastened with dehght, was a translation, 
for he could not read the original, of the oratorical 
Livy. This history became his standing favorite. He 
was in the habit of reading it over and over, again and 
again. And thus, as his classical biographer with 
reason conjectures, he derived at second hand from 
Rome his first notions of that peculiar oratory for 
which he was afterwards distinguished, and much of 
that Roman magnanimity, enthusiastic love of country, 
and ardor of liberty, which gave soul to his eloquence. 

But why this to us ? Have we yet an education to 
9 



66 

perfect ? Are we so ignorant or insensible of the 
value of classical literature, or of its necessary pre- 
cursor, accurate instruction in the learned languages ? 
Or are we an association of tutors and pedagogues, to 
be held responsible for the defaults of the age ? 

Litde, indeed, would it become one of the least in- 
formed among you in that learning of which I have ven- 
tured to speak, not certainly from any present familiar- 
ity, or even past accuracy, in these studies, but rather 
from an old and hereditary regard for them, coupled 
with a deep conviction of their substantial value and 
neglected merit, to address these remarks to you, other- 
wise than as claiming your interest in a great public 
cause. If there be any thing in the argument to which 
you have thus patiently listened; — if it be true, that 
science and those departments of learning, the utihty of 
which is most directly and superficially apparent, w^ill 
be cultivated of course among us, falling in as they do 
with the immediate and pressing demand of the time, 
and of the people in all times ; — but that letters and 
the fine arts require to be fostered and cherished in 
this republican soil with peculiar and extraordinary care, 
lest they should fall into utter neglect and obhvion; — if 
it be true, that these liberal pursuits do indeed elevate, 
dignify, and adorn the character of men and of nations ; 

— if it be true, that our government is built upon public 
opinion, and that opinion is controlled by the tongue 
and the press ; that eff'ective writing and effective speak- 
ing are, or should be, leading objects of republican pur- 
suit and youthful instruction ; and that classical learn- 
ing and literature are the best foundadons of an edu- 
cation conducted with these views and for these ends; 

— if there be anything in this argument, if it be not 
all error, all fallacy, I appeal to you, gendemen, whether 
there is not need of great and substantial reform. 



67 

There is no end to the invention of new and vis- 
ionary schemes for the infusion of learning without 
labor, of knowledge without discipline, into the young 
and growing mind. There is no end to the diversity 
and multiplicity of objects proposed for youthful pur- 
suit, in the vain attempt to make absolute infants 
overtake the modern steamy flight of full-grown intel- 
lect. But if these schemes are, in truth, visionary and 
baseless, our course is partly to retrace our steps ; — 
to begin again with the slow toil of laying broad and 
deep foundations, stone by stone, for the Athenian 
structure we would raise, firm in its fair proportions, 
graceful in its strength. Make our youths accurate in 
the first rudiments of classical learning. Lead them far 
into the niceties of those languages which are chosen 
to enrich their souls. Overcome for them, at least, 
that strangeness and confusion which obscure a half- 
learned tongue. Give them to see the beauty and 
magnificence which lie beyond these clouds. Wake 
them to some sense of the harmony and grandeur of 
the Grecian Muse. Let the eloquence of Rome and 
of Athens speak to them in a voice which they will 
feel as well as hear. Induce them to drink largely at 
those classic fountains of which our fathers deeply 
drank, while we do but taste the scanty rills which 
ooze over the common path. Thus, chiefly, may we 
hope to raise up in the body of this great republic, 
men, who by their knowledge, and their power to use 
that knowledge, shall guide the public weal ; men 
fitted to adorn the councils they direct ; to scatter 
light among the people with whom they mix, and of 
whom they are but a brighter part ; to purify and ex- 
alt the national taste, as well as to expand its intellect ; 
to build up for us a literature which shall immortalize 
the people which brings it into being ; and to conduct 



68 

the prosperous queen of modern republics to the head 
of the refined and intellectual nations of the earth. 

Let it be the glory of our own Harvard, earliest 
nurse of American letters, best of our land in an- 
cient or modern lore, ever foremost in the promotion 
of learning and of liberal arts ; be it her glory now 
to lead anew in this advancement of their cause. Our 
schools cannot choose but follow; and if the public 
voice loudly and earnestly demand that these shall 
rival, or surpass, the best of the old world, that de- 
mand must and will be sadsfied. We are now old 
enough, wealthy enough, I trust wise enough, to insist 
on this advancement. But whether w^e shall advance 
or retrograde, depends wholly upon opinion. It is ripe 
for impulse. The pubhc mind is excited, restless, 
feverish, on this subject of education. It requires con- 
trol and direction. And I call upon you, gendemen, 
to control and direct it. I call upon you as fathers, 
citizens, patrons of our schools and colleges, assem- 
bled representatives of the whole lettered interests of 
New England ; — I invoke you to save us from appa- 
rent peril and disgrace. Through you, only, can the 
public heart be reached ; — not only for your collective 
strength as a hterary body, but because I see among 
you those to whom, individually, the whole public 
looks for counsel and guidance in all momentous 
works. The cause is safe, if you will it. What greater 
cause, except the present salvation of our country from 
impending ruin, what greater cause demands your 
thought 1 Care ye for the republic of letters ; — it is 
your especial trust ; — nor doubt that the republic of 
letters shall hereafter save the Commonwealth. 



VA 15^ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



019 598 385 9 



